Microfluidic system for planar patch-clamp electrode arrays

The patch clamp has been widely accepted as a standard technique for fundamental studies of ion channel proteins, and discovery of drugs that affect these proteins. Traditional patch clamp has a very low throughput which has been proven to be a bottleneck for the drug discovery process. Planar patch-clamp electrode array, which is scaleable and easy to use, provides a potential way to solve this problem.;We present a microfluidic system integrated with disposable cell-interface partitions for simultaneous patch clamp recordings. A disposable partition is made by bonding an air-blown PDMS partition, which has a 2 mum air-blown aperture, to a small glass washer. Then it is reversibly sealed to the fluidic system having fluid exchange channels with isolation valves and Ag/AgCl electrodes. Fluid channels are molded from PDMS using microlithographically defined molds. At the cross-over point, channels in different layers formed a valve. Ag/AgCl electrodes are fabricated with standard microfabrication techniques. The suitability of PDMS valves and microfabricated Ag/AgCl electrodes for patch clamp measurement are examined in this report. Gigaseal patch recordings from RBL-1 cells are obtained with a 24% success rate. Our system allows simultaneous recordings from valve-isolated electrodes.