Conformational transitions and stop-and-go nanopore transport of single-stranded DNA on charged graphene

Manish Shankla and Aleksei Aksimentiev ()
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Manish Shankla: Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign
Aleksei Aksimentiev: University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Control over interactions with biomolecules holds the key to applications of graphene in biotechnology. One such application is nanopore sequencing, where a DNA molecule is electrophoretically driven through a graphene nanopore. Here we investigate how interactions of single-stranded DNA and a graphene membrane can be controlled by electrically biasing the membrane. The results of our molecular dynamics simulations suggest that electric charge on graphene can force a DNA homopolymer to adopt a range of strikingly different conformations. The conformational response is sensitive to even very subtle nucleotide modifications, such as DNA methylation. The speed of DNA motion through a graphene nanopore is strongly affected by the graphene charge: a positive charge accelerates the motion, whereas a negative charge arrests it. As a possible application of the effect, we demonstrate stop-and-go transport of DNA controlled by the charge of graphene. Such on-demand transport of DNA is essential for realizing nanopore sequencing.

Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6171

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