As insightful and penetrating as these studies were, Heilbrunn and Wiercinski (1947) were not able to establish the actual [Ca2+]i in the resting muscle fiber. Indeed, determining the [Ca2+]i has been difficult for any cell type. Hodgkin and Keynes (1957), using 45Ca2+ to examine the mobility of this ion in squid axoplasm, made two important observations: first, that the mobility of Ca2+ is extremely low; second, that the bulk of the Ca2+ is bound, with only 10 μM or less being free and ionized. Further work that established the true [Ca2+]i depended on two technical developments. The first was the application of cation chelators EDTA and EGTA in physiological studies to carefully control the [Ca2+] (Bozler, 1954). Before the availability of effective chelators, it was nearly impossible to construct solutions in the submicromolar range because of the presence of Ca2+ as a contaminant, or leaching from glassware. Whereas EDTA has a high affinity for Ca2+, it also has a substantial affinity for Mg2+. With EGTA, the affinity for Ca2+ is not as high as with EDTA, but the relative insensitivity of EGTA to Mg2+ means that it is a more efficacious chelator for constructing solutions that are specifically buffered for Ca2+. The second important development was the isolation and characterization of the photoprotein aequorin, a Ca2+ sensitive, bioluminescent protein from the jelly fish Aequoria, which provided a means for detecting changes in the [Ca2+] in the submicromolar range (Shimomura et al., 1963). At resting [Ca2+]I, the protein generates only a faint glow; Shimomura et al. (1963) initially determined that the resting concentration was between 0.1 and 1.0 μM. However, as the [Ca2+]i increases, there is an exponential (2.3 power) increase in the amount of light generated, making aequorin a suitable reagent for detecting regions of elevated ion concentration or amplitude modulation.