The objective of the proposed research is to demonstrate hybrid nanopores combining top-down patterning and nanofabrication with bottom-up biological assembly. Existing nanopore sequencing, especially biological nanopores in lipid bilayers, achieve high speed and read length at the cost of decreased parallelization and data throughput. The fragility of the platform also makes it less practical in commercialization. The primary goal of this project is to establish a hybrid biological-solid state structure that can be self-assembled in a robust automated manner with high efficiency. Our preliminary research has identified plausible carriers of biological channels that can be assembled onto ~10nm solid-state nanopore. The proposed work will focus on demonstration of nanopore protein incorporation, self-limited channel insertion, and demonstration of biological nanopore activity with the hybrid platform. The proposed platform retains the speed and read length characteristics of biological nanopore systems while dramatically increasing the parallelization and system stability by leveraging established semiconductor technologies.
The goal of this research is to improve the robustness of nanopore sequencing platforms by combining top-down nanofabrication with self-assembled biological nanopores. If successful, this will address some of the limitations of current efforts t commercialize nanopore sequencing, namely the formation and stability of the nanopores, and the ability to massively parallelize them to achieve high data throughput, an essential next step to prepare the process for commercialization.
