Nanopore DNA sequencing holds great promise for producing long read lengths from small amounts of starting material, however, high error rates are a problem. We perform nonequilibrium electron transport calculations within an effective tight-binding model of the DNA molecule to study the intrinsic structural noise in DNA sequencing via transverse current in nanopores. The structural noise arises from the effect of neighboring bases on the tunneling current. We find that it could be comparable to the environmental noise, which is caused by changes of the position of the molecule with respect to the electrodes in the nanopore. Moreover, while the environmental noise can be reduced by continuous measurement and by improving the measurement setup, the structural noise is intrinsic. With the help of our methodology we optimize the dependence of the structural noise on the measurement parameters, such as the type of the electrodes and the applied bias. We also propose a statistical technique, utilizing not only the currents through the nucleotides but also the correlations in the currents, to improve the fidelity of the sequencing.

• Received 3 January 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.1.034001