An Automatic System for Bilayer Lipid Membrane Formation and Monitoring

Ion channels are natural nanometric pores formed by proteins across cell membranes. They are responsible of part of cell signaling and a large part of pharmaceutical compounds are interacting with them. Therefore, single ion channel screening is being proposed as a fundamental technique for investigating the function of cell membrane proteins with pharmaceutical compounds. The technique consisting in embedding ion channels in artificial bilayer lipid membranes (BLM) is gaining attention over patch clamp approach due to its characteristics of performing parallel tests over selected classes of channels. However, no valid procedures for automatic formation and real time monitoring of BLM arrays have been presented so far. More specifically, since BLM is based on a manual and time-consuming technique, there is a strong need of automatic systems for forming BLMs in a fully parallel fashion for testing compounds in high throughput screening (HTS) fashion. In this paper, an automatic liquid dispensing system for BLM formation is presented using commercial 3+1 axes movement stepper machine together with a multi-sensor technique for monitoring BLM formation in real time. As proof of this concept, the automatic dispensing system is interfaced with an 8 channel electronic interface where low noise amplifiers are able to automatically sense BLM formations by means of current sensing.