A lipid-based passivation scheme for nanofluidics

Stretching DNA in nanochannels allows for direct, visual studies of genomic DNA at the single molecule level. In order to facilitate the study of the interaction of linear DNA with proteins in nanochannels, we have implemented a highly effective passivation scheme based on lipid bilayers. We show long-term passivation of nanochannel surfaces to several relevant reagents and demonstrate that the performance of the lipid bilayer is significantly better compared to standard bovine serum albumin-based passivation. Moreover, we demonstrate how the passivated devices allow us to monitor single DNA cleavage events during enzymatic degradation