Nanopores

Nanopore Bumping and Translocation Nanopore Bumping and Translocation Copyright 2013 David Talaga

Translocation of biopolymers through biological or solid state nanopores has attracted a great deal of attention from experimentalists, theoreticians, and engineers.

The translocation events are detected as a prominent drops of the ionic current due to a partial pore blockage on the pore by the moving chain. The duration of the current drop is associated with the translocation time. Short-time and long-time events are typically observed and are attributed to failed “bumping” and successful “threading” translocation attempts. The qualitative difference in frequency and duration of the two classes of events is attributed to the entropic penalty for a coiled biopolymer (e.g. DNA) to adopt an extended structure, thus generating a hypothesis regarding DNA dynamic structure based on nanopore translocation data.