| The patch-clamp technique allows one to probe single ion channels and macroscopic ion channel activity in their native environment and resolve their activity as their physical and chemical surroundings are varied. The traditional method of patch-clamping cells involves bringing a clean, flame-polished glass pipette tip with a 1-2 mum diameter pore into contact with a cell membrane to form a high electrical resistance seal. This technique is the gold standard for cellular electrophysiology investigations because it allows the observation of single ion channel protein dynamics as well as activity from an ensemble ion channels from a single cell. Furthermore, any drug approved by federal drug agencies must be screened against particular ion channels with the patch-clamp technique. However, this technique by its nature is serial, time consuming, difficult when exchanging pipette solutions, and difficult to integrate with other technologies. These reasons have prompted several investigators to explore alternative approaches to traditional pipette patch-clamping to increase the throughput of measurements.Herein, I describe the development of a silicon-wafer based device platform that enables the measurement of ion channel activities. The electrical nature of the cell/wafer seal is characterized for several pore design variations. The majority of gigaohm seals obtained falls in the range of 10-20GO. The cell-attached and whole cell configurations are demonstrated. Whole cell ion channel activity originating from various cell fines is consistent with the more traditional micropipette patch-clamp recordings. The silicon fabrication methods developed, although novel, utilize established semiconductor technologies, making them amenable to batch fabrication techniques.I integrate these silicon devices with PDMS microfluidics with monolithic valves, allowing ultra-fast solution exchange as low as tens of milliseconds for the extracellular solution. Furthermore, I developed a single cell trap that enables a single cell to be placed directly on top of the pore by purely hydrodynamic means, eliminating user input and dexterity. Thus, the wafer-based platform developed here opens up the possibility to obtain high quality ion channel data in a high throughput fashion. |
