Optimising nanopore systems to advance biosensing applications
The healthcare sector is increasingly benefitting from diagnostic tools that can improve the monitoring of people’s health. So-called biosensors are devices that can analyse samples taken from individuals, and measure whether the constituents of these samples reflect good health. Biological nanopores are a group of membrane proteins which can be used as tools in new biosensing technology, capable of analysing the constituents of biological samples one molecule at a time.
While nanopore-based biosensing technology is highly promising, so far, most scientific work has focused on developing proof-of-concepts. One major issue hindering the development of nanopore biosensing applications is that conventional nanopore systems are highly fragile towards biological samples, making them unusable for the sensing of blood or human serum.
During this PhD project we worked on making nanopore systems more robust by improving the stability of the membranes supporting the nanopores. We discovered that the system’s robustness can be greatly increased by replacing (part of) the lipid membrane that naturally supports biological nanopores with synthetic polymers. However, this is not straightforward. Either you need to optimise the membrane composition with polymers and lipids to ensure that biological nanopores are functional, or you need to engineer the nanopore to make it suitable for polymer-based membranes. Furthermore, we explored the possibility to miniaturise the standard nanopore setup into a small chip, to accelerate the use of nanopore biosensors at the point-of-care. Our results greatly boost the development of nanopore biosensors, as we enabled direct measurements with blood and serum.