Nanion has announced a product line for analysis of bilayer-reconstituted ion channels and nanopores
The first of these, the Orbit 16, allows for automated formation and recordings from 16 bilayers in parallel.
Bilayer recording is a well-established technique for in-depth studies of biophysical properties of ion channels and is particularly suited for functional studies on proteins residing in intracellular membranes.
But despite its proven value, bilayer recording can be very frustrating due to the capricious nature of lipid bilayers which have to be formed manually one by one and which often lack stability.
The Orbit 16 claims to speed up the process by the rapid and simultaneous formation of 16, highly stable micrometer-sized bilayers and allows subsequent parallel recordings.
For increased experimental flexibility, two different recording chips are available; an Ionera's microelectrode cavity array (MECA) - or Nanion's-recording chips for work on (proteo-) liposomes, the latter as known from the Port-a-Patch.
Dr Gerhard Baaken, University of Freiburg, Germany, and founder of Ionera, says: "Thanks to the parallelism of the recordings, the researcher can in most cases obtain data and statistics from one single run."
