Portable membrane protein chip: Development of membrane protein sensors for environment analysis

This paper describes a portable measurement system using membrane proteins (receptors) for environment analysis (Figure 1). Creatures sense ambient stimulations as eyesight, smell, taste, and so on, using recipient cells with the receptors in the cell membrane. If those congenital sensing mechanism is exploitable in an artificial system, the bio-inspired system will be applied for ultrahigh sensitive and selective sensors. For developing this sensor, we have addressed the stable and the reliable bilayer lipid membrane (BLM) as a platform for the membrane proteins. Double-well chamber with the parylene micropore that has the Ag/AgCl electrodes on the bottom of the chamber allows us to make the portable BLM device. As the results, we demonstrate the channel current recordings of the membrane protein using our portable BLM system at an extreme environment (at the summit of Mt. Fuji, Figure 2a). This proves that our system can be brought the higher mountain and measured the signals in wild environments.