"DNA-Dressed NAnopore" for complementary sequence detection

Single molecule electrical sensing with nanopores is a rapidly developing field with potential revolutionary effects on bioanalytics and diagnostics. The recent success of this technology is in the simplicity of its working principle, which exploits the conductance modulations induced by the electrophoretic translocation of molecules through a nanometric channel. Initially proposed as fast and powerful tools for molecular stochastic sensing, nanopores find now application in a range of different domains, thanks to the possibility of finely tuning their surface properties, thus introducing artificial binding and recognition sites. Here we show the results of DNA translocation and hybridization experiments at the single molecule level by a novel class of selective biosensor devices that we call "DNA-Dressed NAnopore" (DNA(2)), based on solid state nanopore with large initial dimensions, resized and activated by functionalization with DNA molecules. The presented data demonstrate the ability of the DNA(2) to selectively detect complementary target sequences, that is to distinguish between molecules depending on their affinity to the functionalization. The DNA(2) can thus constitute the basis for the design of integrable parallel devices for mutation DNA analysis, diagnostics and bioanalytic investigations. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.