A parylene nanopore for stable planar lipid bilayer membranes

This paper describes a microfluidic device for a high through-put ion channel recordings, in which planar bilayer lipid membranes (BLMs) are spanning across a nanometer-sized poly(p-xylylene) (parylene) pore (Figure 1). To make the nanopore, a micrometer-sized pore of parylene was prepared by photolithography, and then parylene was additionally deposited on to the micropore with the isotropic vaporization. As a result, we successfully obtained an 800 nm diameter pore in the parylene film. In addition, BLM was able to be formed stably at the parylene nanpores that was built into the microfluidic device with upper and lower fluidic channels. We also demonstrated to reconstitute of alpha-hemolysin (¿HL) into the BLMs. This device will provide a high reliability platform for the ion-channel recordings.