| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 材料科學與工程學系奈米科技碩博士班 === 100 === In this thesis, bilayer lipid membranes (BLMs) is formed by two lipid monolayers self- assembled at the water/oil interfaces of two encapsulated droplets driven independently by electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) on a digital microfluidic platform. Here several improvements of the platform are demonstrated, including using (1) Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) transparent coplanar electrodes, (2) photo-definable BLM aperture across PerMX sheets, (3) two encapsulated droplets containg different lipid solutions to form asymmetric BLMs, (4) photo-crosslinkable hydrogel PEG1000-DMA to support BLMs.
In our sandwich-structure artificial BLMs platform, we effectively manipulated droplets and clearly provided an optical inspection through transparent coplanar electrodes. By using PerMX sheets, the shapes and dimensions of membrane were defined by photomasks, with flexible designs to provide a stable and durable suspended boundary for BLMs. Moreover, the discontinuous oil phase containing different lipid molecules, of the encapsulated droplets is advantageous to form asymmetric BLMs. Furthermore, by crosslinking the encapsulated droplets having hydrogel prepolymers, the BLMs and Ag/AgCl electrodes were better supported with reduced droplet movements in evaporation. Symmetric BLMs and asymmetric BLMs were successfully formed with similar measured BLM capacitances. The capacitance, thickness and life time of an asymmetric BLM supported by hydrogel were about 31 min, 33.23 pF, 5.64 nm and respertiely, we observed that vaporation of droplets inference BLMs and electrophysiology measurement significantly. Reducing droplet evaporation with a filler oil medium would be one of ther future goals to study membrane protein on the reported platform.
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