FLIPR Membrane Potential Assay Kit

Until now, the method of choice for measuring changes in membrane potential has been patch clamping. Although slow and labor intensive, this technique is the most highly informative and is considered the "gold standard" for the analysis of ion channels. A second, much faster method, is the use of voltage-sensitive dyes on the FLIPR Fluorometric Imaging Plate Reader system. However, available dyes have several limitations, including slow response times that do not provide the same level of information as patch clamping. With the FLIPR Membrane Potential Assay Kit, Molecular Devices introduces a novel reagent system which provides even higher throughput than previous automated FLIPR protocols, while showing good correlation with information that can be obtained with manual patch clamping.

Unmatched Throughput
The FLIPR Membrane Potential Assay Kit combines the benefits of highly informative data that you can get with patch clamping, with the benefits of high-throughput screening that can be obtained with the FLIPR system. Unlike other dyes that have been previously used to study ion channels on FLIPR, this new reagent system allows for elimination of wash steps and much shorter read times on the instrument. Data for a 384-well plate can be collected in less than 2 minutes, as opposed to up to 30 minutes with other dyes, such as DiBAC. And because the dye in the Membrane Potential Assay Kit is much less sensitive to temperature changes than DiBAC, plates can be set up ahead of time and stacked for batch runs, making the assay highly amenable to automation.

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