Poring over biomacromolecules

There’s a certain elegance to nanopore-based sensors. By monitoring how an electric current changes in response to analytes entering a nanopore, it’s possible to discern between all sorts of molecules and ions. In particular, nanopore-based technology has sparked breathtaking advances in our ability to chart the order of nucleotides in DNA molecules. It can read long (we’re talking in the multi-kilobase-scale), and it can read fast. There’s no need for amplification, it’s label-free and can achieve single-molecule accuracies of up to 99.9%. As a result, economical DNA sequencing for the masses is very much on the horizon.