SPICE-Circuit Simulation of the Electrical Response of a Semiconductor Membrane to a Single-Stranded DNA Translocating Through a Nanopore

peer reviewedIn this paper, we describe a circuit-element model for the electric detection of biomolecules in translocation through a nanopore in a semiconductor-oxide-semiconductor (SOS) membrane. The biomolecules are simulated as a superposition of individual charges moving through the nanopore and inducing a charge variation on the membrane electrodes that is modeled as a current source. The SOS membrane is discretized into interconnected elementary circuit elements. The model is tested on the translocation of 11 base single-stranded C3AC7 DNA molecule, for which the electric signal shows good qualitative agreement with the multiscale device approach of Gracheva et al., while quantifying the low-pass filtering in the membrane. Overall, the model confirms the possibility of identifying the sequence of the DNA bases electrically