Harvard Scientists observed Electrical Signals While Passing DNA through Nanopore

8 January 2012

Research team led by Charles Lieber at Harvard University have designed a device that can detect small electrical changes that are produced by the DNA strands while the strands is allowed to pass through the nanopores and the new technique perhaps will bring the revolution in DNA sequencing in the near future. For the first time, Professor Charles and the team has created an integrated nanopore detector.

DNA sequencing is still a time consuming and costly technique and focus around the globe is to minimize the cost of DNA sequencing making it quicker and cost effective. Although nanopores were used for sequencing DNA strands by observing electrical signals more than a decade ago but reading and analyzing those subtle electrical currents is indeed a difficult task and the technique never became a reality at larger scale.

It was a great challenge to measure the tiny changes in electrical currents at localized level, which by developing a detector that is extremely localized, Lieber and his team reached a step closure to DNA sequencing. The technique used by the research team is based on earlier work on nanowires, however changing it to nanoscale nanowire transistor and amplifying the electrical potential at pore level made the task more convenient and scalable.

Researchers were not only able to measure the electric potential quickly as larger signal, which is an important aspect of DNA sequencing as DNA is large enough so that each and every part of it is correctly analyzed. This localized measurement also scalable and parallel sequencing can easily be carried out and this will further significantly reduce the cost of DNA sequencing. 

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