Invited Paper BI+NC-ThM9
Electrically Insulating Pore-Suspending Membranes on Highly Ordered Porous Alumina

Thursday, October 23, 2008, 10:40 am, Room 202

In the last years, we have developed a membrane system that combines the merits of freestanding and solid supported bilayers. These membranes suspend the pores of a highly ordered porous material such as porous alumina (nano-BLMs) or porous silicon (micro-BLMs). In this talk, I will discuss the electrical properties and stability of these membranes as a function of lipid composition and under flow conditions. We were able to demonstrate that a buffer solution exchange can be readily achieved by placing the membranes in a flow system. The membranes turned out to be stable as evaluated by the changes in membrane resistance obtained from impedance analysis. The membrane resistances are sufficiently high to analyze ion channel activity on the single channel level. In particular, we have demonstrated that connexins can be inserted into nano-BLMs exhibiting full functionality.