Oocyte Recording Services

Dr. Timm Danker
Group Leader Elektrophysiology

+49 7121 51530-896

E-Mail

Oocytes from Xenopus leavis are a great system for studies on ion transport and ion channel physiology. Due to high usage in research laboratories, their features are well studied and, therefore, they are considered as a trustworthy research model.

Oocyte recording offers several benefits over other methods:

• fast and reliable expression of any ion channel,
• subunit stoichiometry,
• recordings of small currents,
• co-expression of cofactors, 
• cheap compared to the cell line generation.

Applications

Automated Xenopus oocyte assays, implemented on the Roobocyte platform, offer high-quality voltage-clamp electrophysiology for drug screening and compound profiling on ion channel targets:

• Pharmacology on a single type of ion channel,
• characterization of ion channel mutations, subunit compositions, species differences, 
• characterization of electrogenic transporters.

Standard Assays

Standard assays are routinely available and can be started at any time. They generally test for the potency of compounds in blocking or modulating the target ion channel. Using one oocyte per data point and sufficient compound incubation time, high data quality is guaranteed. Dose-response curves are carried out by testing each data point on an individual oocyte.

Customer specific solutions

• Customer-specific solutions for ion channels and transporters that are difficult to express in mammalian cell lines
• Support for structure-based drug design
• Analysis of ion channels with mutations in relevant binding regions to study drug binding behavior

Ligand Gated Ion Channels

Ligand-gated ion channels require fast and reliable compound applications. We offer services with standard and improved recording heads. Our proprietary HPS recording heads ensure high-quality recordings.

Publications

• Orhan, Gökce, et al. "Dominant‐negative effects of KCNQ2 mutations are associated with epileptic encephalopathy." Annals of neurology 2014 | Contact an Author.

• Beissner, Mirko, et al. "Efficient binding of 4/7 α-conotoxins to nicotinic α4β2 receptors is prevented by Arg185 and Pro195 in the α4 subunit." Molecular pharmacology 2012 |Contact an Author.

• Pehl, Ulrich, et al. "Automated higher-throughput compound screening on ion channel targets based on the Xenopus laevis oocyte expression system." Assay and drug development technologies 2004