Institut Charles Sadron News

The PMC group of the ICS has described the decoding of digitally-encoded polymers in a protein nanopore. This work has been performed in collaboration with researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and was just published in Science Advances. Although nanopore sensing is an established technique for DNA sequencing, this is the first time that a synthetic polymer is decoded using this method. Interestingly, the molecular design of the polymer allows single-monomer decryption; a feature that is usually not attainable in DNA sequencing. Overall, these results open up interesting opportunities for the design of miniaturized sequencing devices, which could be useful for anti-counterfeiting and traceability applications. Click here to know more about this article.

Engineered bacterial pores (aerolysin pore-forming toxin from A. hydrophila in yellow) can decode digital information stored in tailored-made polymers (shown here in atomic representation: n-propyl-phosphate blocks capped by di-deoxyadenosine terminals). Credit: Matteo Dal Peraro (aerolysin structure)/iStock (background).