Nanosensors for next generation drug screening

Abstract

One promising path for future drug screening technologies is to examine the binding of ligands to target proteins at the single molecule level by passing them through nanometer sized pores and measuring the change in pore current during translocation. With the aim of evaluating such technologies we perform virtual experiments on the translocation of proteins through silicon nitride nanopores. These simulations consist of large scale, fully atomistic models of the translocation process that involve steering a test protein through the nanopore on a timescale of tens of nanoseconds. We make a comparison between theoretically expected and simulated values of the current drop that is seen when th..