Nanopore DNA sequencing is one of the most promising technique toward the third generation fast, low cost, and direct reading long chain DNA sequencing, which is extremely significant in understanding disease, inheritance and for personalized medicine. Negatively charged DNA molecules in solution could be dragged through a nanopore connecting two fluidic cells as the only channel when a biased voltage was applied. DNA translocation through nanopores would cause a sudden drop in the ionic current due to DNA occupation of the pore. Two parameters extracted from the ionic current drop, the drop magnitude (event depth) and the drop duration time (event length), can give corresponding information of the translocated DNA.

One of the main challenge remained in solid-state nanopore DNA sequencing is that the membrane containing nanopore is too thick (>10 nm) to read single base information. BN has high temperature stability, low dielectric constant, high mechanical strength, large thermal conductivity, high hardness, and high corrosion resistance. BN has been widely used in high-performance electronic devices integrated with graphene due to a high band gap and low mismatch with the graphene lattice. Moreover, the thickness of a single layer f BN is comparable to the spacing between nucleotides in ssDNA, which makes it a competitive candidate to realize single-base resolution on superthin nanopore structures.

Recently, associate Professor Qing Zhao, and graduate student Song Liu in Prof. Dapeng Yu’s group have made new progress in this field after 4 years efferts. They demonstrate the first report of DNA translocation through BN nanopores: double-stranded DNA molecules were successfully translocated through highquality two- or three-layer BN nanopores. The BN nanopores showed much higher sensitivity in DNA single-molecule detection compared with SiN nanopores. The effective thickness of BN is around 1.1 nm, from TEM analyses and numerical simulations, indicating a high spatial resolution can be achieved by using BN nanopores. The corresponding results have been published in Advanced Materialshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.201301336.

This work is supported by National 973 projects from the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics.