By SCIENCEDAILY - SCIENCEDAILY
Added: Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:08:33 UTC

Thanks to TheRationalizer for the link
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A team of researchers from Delft University of Technology announces a new type of nanopore devices that may significantly impact the way we screen DNA molecules, for example to read off their sequence. In a paper entitled 'DNA Translocation through Graphene Nanopores' (published online in Nano Letters), they report a novel technique to fabricate tiny holes in a layer of graphene (a carbon layer with a thickness of only 1 atom) and they managed to detect the motion of individual DNA molecules that travel through such a hole.

There is a worldwide race to develop fast and low-cost strategies to sequence DNA, that is, to read off the content of our genome. Particularly promising for the next generation of sequencing are devices where one measures on single molecules. Imagine a single DNA molecule from one of your cells (3 billion bases, 1 meter long if you would stretch it from head to tail) that is read -- base per base -- in real time while sliding between two of your fingers. This is what postdoc dr. Gregory Schneider in the group of professor Cees Dekker and colleagues from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience have in mind. They now demonstrated a first step in that direction: To slide a single molecule of DNA through a tiny nanoscale hole made in the thinnest membrane that nature can offer, a 1-atom thin layer of graphene.
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TAGGED: GENETICS, TECHNOLOGY