IME researchers have demonstrated a novel method of fabricating buried microchannels and their potential use for integrated patch clamping. The patch-clamp recording is a golden standard for studying cellular ion channel, pore-forming proteins across cell membrane permeable to ions. Despite its importance in drug discovery, the conventional patch clamping remains to be a high-precision and laborious method which requires a skilled scientist to navigate the tip of a glass micropipette towards a single cell with the aid of a precision micromanipulator and optical microscope.

The buried microchannels, created by reforming doped glass in silicon trenches, aim at an automated and high-throughput patch clamping by mimicking surface of a conventional glass patch pipette. The process shown is simple and yet produces a smooth and round glass aperture that is lateral and nontrivial via planar micromachining. The fabrication process allows diameter of the apertures to be tailored from several micrometers to less than hundreds of nanometer. Through these apertures, nearby cells can be maneuvered and captured via suction. For the chip-based patch clamping, such lateral configuration offers numerous advantageous over the planar counterparts which are being actively pursued worldwide. IME researchers believe that such round capillaries, since they can be made in tens of nanometers, may also find use in molecular analysis involving DNA and proteins.

A patent has been filed and the study has been published in Applied Physics Letters, 89, 093902, (2006) at http://apl.aip.org/