Droplet Polymer Bilayers for Bioelectronic Membrane Interfacing

New collaborations have created new opportunities for our synthetic biology sensors. The lab's efforts to build cell membrane-derived bioelectronic devices is led by Dr. Emily Schafer, with the aim of creating platforms with the same sensing mechanisms as living cells.

In this paper, now out in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, we teamed up with Dr. Stephen Sarles and colleagues from University of Tennessee to form a new class of polymer supported bilayers. These droplet polymer bilayers (DPBs) on PEDOT:PSS increase the reproducibility and dynamic range of the resulting membrane sensors. In fact, DPBs considerably outperform more standard supported lipid bilayers (SLBs) on PEDOT:PSS electronics.

Excitingly, droplet bilayers like DPBs enable integration of membrane sensors into electrode arrays, meaning that future work can test dozens of membranes in parallel. In this work, we show a proof-of-concept array design with a planar reference electrode to more simply characterize membrane sensing events in parallel.

The future vision of this work is to next incorporate complex transmembrane proteins for detection of biologically-relevant stimuli, such as ions, neurotransmitters, voltage, light, and more. We also hope that this membrane and device design can be used for understanding mechanisms of various drugs on membrane proteins and as a drug screening platform. We're proud to share this work and look forward to the next!