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Planar bilayer lipid membranes (BLMs) are important tools in studying ion channels and their engineered applications. To create BLMs techniques are still based on those devised by Montal and Mueller in early 60s. Membranes created by these methods are not mechanically robust enough to transport. These methods are typically labor intensive and membranes created
by these methods are lack of stability. To ameliorate the shortcomings membranes using high melting temperature solvent mixture were devised. Briefly, 2:8 mixture of n-decane and hexadecane, which freezes at ~14°C, was spread over a small aperture and froze before its spontaneous self-assembly process to a bilayer membrane. This membrane precursor can be
stored frozen, enabling transportation. Since the membrane precursor can be created in a central facility and shipped to any place, a membrane can be created simply by thawing the membrane precursor. This membrane precursor can be transported to other place and thawed when a membrane is needed. Expertise to create a lipid bilayer membrane is no longer required to
perform ion channel related experiments. Although this technique alleviated expertise from the membrane formation technique, widening the usability of lipid bilayer membranes in a number of applications, the main drawback of the conventional system still exists. Conventionally a lipid bilayer membrane forms on a partition usually made of hydrophobic materials such as Teflon, Kel-F, and Polyethylene. Membrane formation on the partition is solely dependent upon a selfassembly process, resulting in the large variations of membrane formation time. In the previous work with the frozen membrane precursor, the self-assembly process remained unchanged, which made membrane formation time vary from 30 minutes to 24 hours. In this work, however, a PDMS (Polydimethylsiloxane) gasket was used for the membrane support in
place of the partition. PMDS is typically known to extract organic solvent, facilitating lipid bilayer formation. Membrane formation time with our method reduced down to ~30 minutes. Membranes were created timely in a controlled manner. Combined with automated machinery, an array of lipid bilayer membrane can be created for the potential use of highthroughput ion channel screening. The high throughput ion channel screening is an important tool in drug discovery and ion channel studies. To demonstrate high-throughput measurement of ion channels we devised a analog switch, enabling sequential measurement of each membrane using just one amplifier. Membranes measured using this switch were shown identical to those in the conventional system. We will show a number of potential applications using our membrane system.