Asma Uz-Zaman: Electrical Characterization of the qNano for Particle Detection

Electrical Characterization of the qNano for Particle Detection:

During the span of nine weeks of this program, I worked on characterizing the qNano under the supervision of Professor William Dunbar. qNano is a nanopore instrument manufactured by the New Zealand based company Izon. The nanopore is seated in an elastomeric (stretchable) membrane, which means the pore can be stretched to have varying sizes. Having varying sizes allows for a greater range of possibilities for colloidal particle capture. The focus right now is to see how the different pore sizes and voltages affect the particle capture rate, using a known 200 nm particle type.

I worked on gathering data with varying pore sizes (deltaX) and biases (voltages) and later analyzing it. The goal was to fit a distribution to the data gathered to see how the different deltaX’s affect the rate of capture. The ultimate goal of the project is virus detection. Virus particles range in size from 10 nm to 300nm, and we believe such particles should be detectable using this instrument once it is characterized.

The benefits of using a stretchable nanopore are that the experiments are easy to set-up and run. The pore can be re-used, it is inexpensive to make, and the elasticity allows potentially for real-time particle detection and characterization for a population of heterogeneous particle sizes.