Fabrication and Characterization of an Integrated Biological Nanopore Electrical Readout Platform

During this internship at imec Leuven, the student will perform the fabrication and characterization of an integrated biological nanopore-electrode electrical readout platform. This platform that we are developing builds on the so-called Arrayed Lipid bilayer chamber system (ALBiC) [Watanabe et al. Nature communications 2014] platform. At imec, we enable the electrical readout of the biological nanopores by adding electrodes to the microwell chambers that are covered by lipid bilayers. During the internship the the student will fabricate the devices in imec's state-of-the-art cleanroom and will optically and electrically characterize the functionality of the biological nanopores on this platform.

Moreover, in a second phase of the internship, the platform will be equipped with integrated nanofluidic channels to increase the functionality of the system for high-throughput biosensing. The student will assist in optimizing the processing conditions for this complex sensing platform and deliver a demonstrator device. Finally, the functionality of the devices with integrated nanofluidic channels, microelectrodes and biological nanopores will be explored in depth using optical and electrical characterization techniques.