Chip-based provides control over individual molecules

The researchers at UC Santa Cruz have used the device to control the delivery of individual biomolecules - including ribosomes, DNA, and proteins - into a fluid-filled channel on the chip. The device can also be used to sort different types of molecules, providing selective analysis of target molecules from a mixture. The team’s findings are published in Nature Communications.

The capabilities of the programmable nanopore-optofluidic device point the way toward a novel research tool for high-throughput single-molecule analysis on a chip, said Holger Schmidt, the Kapany Professor of Optoelectronics at UC Santa Cruz and corresponding author of the paper.

"We can bring a single molecule into a fluidic channel where it can then be analysed using integrated optical waveguides or other techniques," Schmidt said in a statement. "The idea is to introduce a particle or molecule, hold it in the channel for analysis, then discard the particle, and easily and rapidly repeat the process to develop robust statistics of many single-molecule experiments."