RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Cooperative electrolyte-PEG interactions drive the signal amplification in a solid-state nanopore
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.11.01.466478
DO 10.1101/2021.11.01.466478
A1 Chalmers C. Chau
A1 Fabio Marcuccio
A1 Dimitrios Soulias
A1 Martin A. Edwards
A1 Sheena E. Radford
A1 Eric W. Hewitt
A1 Paolo Actis
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/03/2021.11.01.466478.abstract
AB Nanopore systems have emerged as a leading platform for the analysis of biomolecular complexes with single molecule resolution. However, the analysis of several analytes like short nucleic acids or proteins with nanopores represents a sensitivity challenge, because their translocation lead to small signals difficult to distinguish from the noise. Here, we report a simple method to enhance the signal to noise ratio in nanopore experiments by a simple modification of the solution used in nanopore sensing. The addition of poly-ethylene glycol (PEG) and the careful selection of the supporting electrolyte leads to large signal enhancement. We observed that the translocation dynamics are in good agreement with an established method that uses the lattice energy of an electrolyte to approximate the affinity of an ion to PEG. We identified CsBr as the optimal supporting electrolyte to complement PEG to enable the analysis of dsDNA at 500 kHz bandwidth, and the detection of dsDNA as short as 75 bp.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.ABBREVIATIONSPBSPhosphate Buffered SalinePEGPoly(ethylene) glycoldsDNAdouble stranded DNASNRsignal-to-noise ratioMWmolecular weight