Abstract
Lipid bilayers formed on micropores possess excellent properties for electrical measurements given the low membrane capacitance and high voltage stability. However, conventional methods employed in the fabrication of micropores on semiconducting materials require large-scale equipment with many fabrication steps. To address this problem, we have developed a novel method that generates Teflon micropores in a few seconds by imposing a heated tip onto commercial Polyethylene, Polyethylene terephthalate, Polypropylene and Teflon films. These advantages promise to improve the performance of artificial lipid bilayers when employed in the development of flexible biosensors and a combination system with atomic force microscope (AFM). Thus we succeeded in activating a single channel protein by mechanically stimulating it with an AFM probe, indicating our novel technologies have the potential to be a very powerful tool for the analyses of the activation-deactivation dynamics in channel proteins.
