There are many several different ways to clean the electrodes. What do you suspect may be contaminating them? If you are worried about photoresist residue from the fabrication process, clean the electrodes with acetone and isopropanol. For a more thorough clean, you could follow an RCA-1 process to clean all remaining organic residue from the surface.

Dear Melinda

Thank you for your answer. Could you tell me mo detail about RCA-1 process?

Hi Ahn,

The details of the process can be found here: http://www.inrf.uci.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/sop-wet-silicon-rca-1.pdf. There is another, more rigorous cleaning procedure called Piranha, but this involves more dangerous chemicals. I would try the RCA-1 first and see if you get better results.

In my experiments using similar electrodes with cells, we also typically incubate devices with a 2% solution of BSA for 15 minutes to minimize non-specific binding of the cells in the device.

Mindy