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P12006
An Automated Microfluidic Dose-Response System for Ion Channels
Presenter Cristian Ionescu-Zanetti, Fluxion Biosciences, USA
Additional Authors: Jeff Jensen, Andrew Blatz, Mike Schwartz (Fluxion Biosciences)

Recently, several automated electrophysiology systems have been developed to address the need for high quality, higher throughput studies on ion channels.  The existing commercial systems are general purpose devices, even though the majority of assays performed by these systems relate to determination of dose-response relationships. Fluxion Biosciences has developed a microfluidic system for ion channel research that is optimized for dose-response measurements. The IonFlux-100 System automatically generates two 6-concentration dose-response curves on up to 8 cells in parallel. Given the typical success rate for automated voltage clamp studies of around 50%, an ‘n’ of 4 is obtained.  Since all cells in a dose-response experiment are bathed with the same compound in parallel, variability is likely to be less than experiments conducted on systems that operate on one cell (or a population of cells) at a time.  In addition, throughput is maximized through the use of microfluidic application of compounds rather than via a typically slow robotic liquid handler; the IonFlux system can achieve 24 dose-response curves per hour. Optical access to each voltage-clamped cell is maintained and allows multiplexed optical assays, such as Ca flux, to be performed simultaneously with voltage clamp assays. Use of the IonFlux-100 system for generation of dose-response curves on potassium channels and application of the system to ligand-gated channels will be presented Session P13 Target Biology & Screening Kinases