Single-Molecule Analysis of Membrane Transporter Activity by Means of a Microsystem

Emerging microtechnologies are aimed at developing a microsystem with densely packed array structure, i.e., an array with a femtoliter reaction chamber, for highly sensitive and quantitative biological assays. Here, we describe a novel femtoliter chamber array system (arrayed lipid bilayer chambers, ALBiC) that contains approximately a million femtoliter chambers, each sealed with a phospholipid bilayer membrane with extremely high efficiency (>90%). This novel platform enables detection of membrane transporter activity at the single-molecule level and thus expands the applicability of femtoliter chamber arrays to highly sensitive assays of transporters.