Hamburg 2001 – scientific programme

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HL: Halbleiterphysik

HL 29: Neue Materialien und Verfahren

HL 29.3: Talk

Thursday, March 29, 2001, 11:00–11:15, S17

A microstructured chip device for low noise single ion channel recording — •Niels Fertig, Christine Meyer, Robert Blick, and Jan Behrends — Center for NanoScience (CeNS), Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 Munich, Germany

We present a new technique where a chip electrode is used for single channel recordings from planar lipid bilayers. The chip electrode replaces the punctured teflon sheet or the tip of a pipette that are commonly used to prepare a bilayer membrane. An aperture is etched into a glass or quartz chip and can be reduced in size down to the sub-micron scale. Lipid bilayers in these apertures are prepared by the technique of Mueller/Rudin. Recordings are taken from gramicidin A channels. Due to the small size of the bilayers their capacitance is low and therefore a extraordinarily low noise level can be reached. In addition, the small bilayer area and the planar geometry of the chip electrode make this approach very attractive for optical/spectroscopical experiments and the application of scanning probe techniques. As this can be done with concomitant electrical recordings it enables structure-function studies on the single molecule level. Therefore the chip electrode approach presented here is an significant improvement compared to the common bilayer recording techniques.