Commercial surfactants, which are inexpensive and abundant, were covalently grafted to flat and transparent electrodes, and it appears to be a simple functionalization route to design biomembrane sensors at large-scale production. Sparsely tethered bilayer lipid membranes (stBLM) were stabilized using such molecular coatings composed of diluted anchor-harpoon surfactants that grab the membrane with an alkyl chain out of a PEGylated-hydrogel layer, which acts as a soft hydration cushion. The goal of avoiding the synthesis of complex organic molecules to scale up sensors was achieved here by grafting nonionic diblock oligomers (Brij58 = C xH2 x+1(OCH2CH2) nOH with x = 16 and n = 23) and PEO short chains ((OCH2CH2) nOH with n = 9 and n = 23) from their hydroxyl (-OH) end-moiety to a monolayer of -Ar-SO2Cl groups, which are easy to form on electrodes (metals, semiconducting materials, ...) from aryl-diazonium salt reduction. A hybrid molecular coating on gold, with scarce Ar-SO2-Brij58 and PEO oligomers, was used to monitor immobilization and fusion kinetics of DOPC small unilamellar vesicles (SUV) by both quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) techniques. Using flat and transparent thin chromium film electrodes, we designed biosensors to couple surface sensitive techniques for membranes, including X-ray reflectivity (XRR), atomic force microscopy (AFM) with subnanometer resolution, and optical microscopy, such as fluorescence recovery after photobleaching measurements (FRAP), in addition to electrochemistry techniques (cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS)). The advantages of this biomembrane-sensing platform are discussed for research and applications.
Keywords: Brij; CiEj; biomimetic lipid membrane; electrochemical impedance spectroscopy; membrane biosensors; non-ionic diblock copolymer; oligomeric surfactants; sparsely tethered phospholipid bilayer.