Contrary to my initial expectations, the Orbit mini has performed exceptionally well for our application, with vastly improved signal-to noise characteristics over our best recordings on the home-built system.
The compactness of the instrument makes for flexible and convenient placement in the lab. With a tiny footprint, it sits on a table or desk accompanied by only a laptop. In addition, bilayers are painted ‘blind’ with a Teflon wand supplied by Nanion without observing the partition through a microscope. Thus, the entire support-package of microscope, illuminator, Faraday cage, vibration-table, and rig-rack is eliminated. The acquisition software is intuitive and robust, and the data can be stored in formats readable by the Axon analysis programs that we routinely use. Moreover, the four electrically independent holes in the chip-partition means that four bilayers can be monitored simultaneously, thus quadrupling the probability of catching a clean single channel to record. This represents a significant, practical boost in experimental efficiency.