Nanopore thermodynamics via infrared laser heating

Single molecule nanopore spectroscopy is a label-free method for characterizing a wide variety of water-soluble molecules. Recently there have been efforts to expand nanopore sensing to new areas of study. Forensic investigators require an easy to deploy method to identify an unknown number of contributors in a solution. Currently there is no easily available method to distinguish between a single or multiple contributor solution of DNA before being processed by more advanced analytical techniques which has led to wasted time and resources increasing the backlog of samples waiting to be processed. In this work we present a new nanopore technique capable of distinguishing between single and multiple contributors with an easy to deploy infrared heating laser. Previous cluster-nanopore enhancement interaction studies, produced by this group, have found that polymers in the presence of a gold-nanopore complex spend longer periods of time inside the pore. This is of great interest to the nanopore sensing community because longer residence times enable more accurate statistics on single polymers. In order to understand why x some polymers see large enhancements in the residence times (i.e. 20x) while other polymers see much less enhancement (i.e. 3x) a more complete picture of the free energy components is required. By using a IR heating laser, we construct an Eyring transition graph to extract the enthalpic and entropic energy components to find entropy plays a more important role than previously thought when a polymer interacts with a the nanopore. For nanoconfined polymers, entropy plays an important role on how a polymer will interact with the cluster-nanopore structure which in turn may lead to an increase or decrease of the residence time enhancement factor. This work shows with the addition of an infrared laser heater to a nanopore system a new tool has been added to the field. The IR laser coupled to a nanopore system allows for precise adjustments to residence times of events and extracts the free energy components without the need to physically modify the nanopore