Nanotechnology got its new application in DNA sequencing

1 January 2010

Carbon nanotubes are of many forms and these finds variety of applications in all spheres of material science, energy and medicine. In the present work, researchers from Centre of Single Molecule of Arizona State University and Biodesign Institute have successfully demonstrated the use of carbon nanotube for DNA sequencing and the details is published in the current issue of Science.

Carbon naotubes having unique arrangements of carbon atoms exhibits many special physical and chemical properties and researchers used these properties for DNA sequencing. They passes a single stranded DNA ribbon through the carbon nanotube and noted the voltage spikes that were produced by DNA. The information later was analyzed for obtaining the information on DNA.

Nearly a decade ago, first human genome code at the cost of over $1 billion was successfully decoded by researchers. A genome consists of more than 3 billion base pairs and it was then really a difficult and challenging task to get information on all these pairs. For the current study, researchers took single walled carbon nanotubes, which were grown on oxidized silicon wafer.

On passing electric currents through the carefully selected 1-2 nm diameter single walled carbon nanotubes, the oligomers part of the single stranded DNA having 60 or 120 nucleotides get translocated. These oligomers will generally be collected from cathode side and the speed of translocation is dependent upon the DNA molecular weight and the nucleotide structure. Researchers are obtaining perfection in the technique and once they succeed in this, the DNA analysis will be much faster and much accurate than the current existing methods.

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