An on-chip artificial pore for molecular sensing

Abstract

Currently, a variety of strategies for developing nanopores for molecular sensing exist- from engineering transmembrane protein pores so that they can detect sequence-specific DNA strands with single-base resolution [1, 2] to drilling molecular-scaled holes into silicon nitride membranes to detect the presence of single molecules of DNA [3, 4] to employing gold [5] or carbon [6] nanotubes as the ultimate artificial pores. While all of these strategies have shownearly success in molecular sensing, there are major technological hurdles one must overcome: reproducibly creating an effective pore, maintaining a pore's stability over a period of time, and integrating the pore into a device that is inexpensive and easy to fabricate and use. Here, we describe our group's effort in developing a fullyintegrated artificial pore on chip for molecular sensing. As we will demonstrate, our pore addresses the technological hurdles with which other nanopore strategies are confronted. Equally important, we will show that our on-chip artificial pore is a flexible platform technology that has a number of diverse applications'from label-free immunoassays to single-molecule DNA sizing. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.