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September 3rd, 2007

Sucking nanospaghetti through nanopores - the art of single-molecule spectroscopy

Abstract:
There is a significant and growing need across the research and medical communities for low-cost, high throughput DNA separation and quantification techniques. The isolation of DNA is a prerequisite step for many molecular biology techniques and experiments. Although single molecule techniques afford extremely high sensitivity, to date, such experiments have remained within the confines of academic and research laboratories. The primary reasons for this state of affairs relate to throughput, detection efficiencies and analysis times. For example, in a conventional solution-based single molecule detection experiment, one can only detect approximately 10,000 molecules per minute, or one molecule every 6 milliseconds. While this may sound a lot, consider that a small drop of water (ca. 5 ml) contains approx. 1.67 x 1023 molecules, that is 1.67 followed by 23 zeros. At that speed you need over 100 trillion years to detect all the water molecules in this single drop. Using a novel nanopore array developed by researchers in the UK, expect to be able to detect up to 1 million molecules simultaneously in the same 6 millisecond time window, representing an improvement in throughput of over six orders of magnitude (and bringing the timeframe for analyzing the molecules in a single water drop down to some 60 billion years - about five to six times the estimated age of the universe).

Source:
nanowerk.com

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