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Biochemical sensors

Adapting to nanoscale events

Nature volume 398, pages 660–661 (1999)Cite this article

A hallmark of twentieth-century science has been the continual development of experimental strategies to observe individual atomic-scale ‘events’. These strategies ultimately rely on significantly amplifying the consequences of a selective microscopic interaction, for example the chemical development of a silver halide grain in a photographic emulsion, the condensation of a droplet around a single ion in a cloud chamber, or the charge amplification in electron multiplier devices.

New strategies for detecting and characterizing single-molecule events are now emerging in the biochemical sciences. The latest example comes from Gu et al. on page 686of this issue1. This group, working in Hagan Bayley's laboratory, show how measurement of ionic transport through a single, atomic-scale pore in an insulating membrane can be used to detect organic molecules of relative molecular mass as low as 100. Coupled with highly sensitive semiconductor electronics, the membrane-pore system can amplify these currents on timescales commensurate with the interaction times between the molecule and the pore. The system thus reveals the presence, nature and interaction of single molecules with the pore. Remarkably, a single protein channel can be adapted for simultaneous analysis of a mixture of organic molecules.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Daniel Branton and Jene Golovchenko are in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Daniel Branton & Jene Golovchenko

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  1. Daniel Branton
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  2. Jene Golovchenko
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Branton, D., Golovchenko, J. Adapting to nanoscale events. Nature 398, 660–661 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/19412

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