Crown Ether-Modified Bilayer Lipid Membranes on Solid Support as Ion Sensors

Bilayer lipid membranes (BLMs) after suitable modofications have been reported as sensitive and selective electrochemical probes for inorganic ions. They are prepared as follows: when a metalic wire covered with a Teflon tubing has been cut in the organic phase and put into an aqueous solution, the amphiphilic lipid molecules in the solution have aligned at the interfaces of a metal/organic and organic/aqueous phases which resulted in the formation of the self-assembled solid supported bilayer lipid membranes (s-BLMs). With the modification of crown ether molecules in the s-BLMs, the membrane potentials were observed to show Nernst response to the concentration of metal cations in the range of 10 −4 - 10 −1 mol.dm −3 . Paper presented at the 12th School on Biophysics of Membrane Transport, Zakapone, Poland, 4-14 May 1994.