Improving reliability of solid-state nanopore sensors through redundancy and chemical functionalization

Solid-state nanopores—tiny holes in thin glass similar in size to biomolecules like proteins or DNA—are poised to disrupt many essential growth markets, including genomics and proteomics, personalized medicine, point-ofcare diagnostics, and next-generation information storage. While holding great promise as a broadly applicable
disruptive technology, solid-state nanopore sensors are individually failure-prone, requiring use of many in parallel, as well as improvements to individual pore quality, before being able to deliver on this promise. This project seeks to consolidate several key advances, include a novel method of nanopore fabrication that can scale to arrays of pore, and surface modifications recently reported, to deliver redundant arrays of reliable nanopores as the basis for solid-state nanopores to deliver on their promise.

Faculty Supervisor:

Marc Ekker;Andre Beauchemin

Student:

Partner:

Northern Nanopore Instruments Inc.

Discipline:

Physics

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services; Retail trade

University:

University of Ottawa

Program: