A Multichannel Electrophysiology Workbench for Single Ion Channel Screening

Abstract

Ion channels are involved into a large amount of processes of the cell life, regulating ion exchange between intra and extra cellular environment. Several diseases are affected by unregulated protein behavior and the possibility to test target drugs with single ion channels will open new approaches for the drug discovery and screening. This could be accomplished by testing single ion channels into artificial lipid membranes arrays.Currently, it is possible to monitor ionic current flowing through ion channels embedded into BLMs, cells or giant lipid vesicles, by characterizing the electrical transmembrane protein behaviour using laboratory techniques and low noise equipment for signal acquisition. State-of-the-art equipments offer high precision recording amplifiers that are able to sense single ion channels. However, these techniques require sophisticated manual skills. On the other hand, High Throughput Screening systems require high data volumes implemented with automatic procedures. At the moment, they are available only for patch-clamp techniques.We present a multichannel electrophysiology system for single ion channel recording, based on a modular system embedded into a hybrid architecture that is able to record single ion channels on an arbitrary number of spots. The system is composed of:• an array of disposable microfluidic chambers with embedded Silver/SilverChloride electrodes, for manual or automatic formation of BLMs to host single ion channel experiments, tightly interfaced with low noise electronics front-end;• an array of low noise integrated microelectronic interfaces for signal amplification and analog to digital conversion;• digital data elaboration and link to PC;• a graphical user interface for data display and storage.The flexibility of the proposed architecture allows different configurations, ranging from a limited number of data channels to be monitored, suitable for manual experiments, to thousands of data channels, coping with automatic HTS requirements.