An Automatic Offset Correction Platform for High-Throughput Ion-Channel Electrophysiology

High-throughput ion channel screening for drug discovery is at the base of the recent shift of resources in the pharmaceutical industry towards addressing drug safety issues earlier in the discovery process. Very few examples of parallel ion-channel recording platforms are currently present in literature, due to the complexity of the setup. However, single-junction Ag/AgCl electrodes suffer of intrinsic voltage offsets, due to the electrode-buffer interface variability. This is very critical, since ion-channel recording requires high accuracy (pA resolution) within the full-scale (nA range), limiting the operability of the measurement, especially on a multi-channel approach. This paper presents an automatic offset correction system fully implemented on a lipid bilayer membrane platform. The platform allows offset-free recording of ion-channel signals acquired and displayed by means of a graphical user interface. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.