Abstract
This paper describes construction of planar lipid bilayers and its application using microfabricated and microfluidic devices. Microfabrication and microfluidics have the potential to significantly change the way of recent chemical or biological experiments. Microfabricated devices offer the ability to work with smaller sample volumes, shorter reaction time, and the possibility of parallel operation. They also hold the promise of integrating an entire onto a single chip, as lab–on–a–chip. In this review, we introduce recent our approach for artificial cell membrane chip and biomimetic microfluidic devices. Artificial cell membranes have emerged as a biometric tool in such areas as membrane protein study, synthetic biology, and drug discovery. We propose a stable and reproducible preparation procedure for the planar lipid bilayers using “droplet contact method”, and they are applying to membrane protein measurements with a microfabricated device. These concepts are based on the conjugation between artificial (mechanically fabricated) materials and biomaterials, and this thought of the conjugation is promising to make unprecedented system.
