Nathan Nguyen: Analysis of Solid State Nanopore for Signal Processing and Control

Nathan Nguyen is a fourth year undergraduate Bioinformatics major and Astrophysics minor at University of California - Santa Cruz. His goal is to attend graduate school and become a research scientist. For the SURF-IT 2012 program, Nathan worked in the Dynamics and Control Laboratory of the Computer Engineering department.

The lab is currently doing research on solid state nanopores and DNA to advance the technique of DNA sequencing. When single-stranded DNA pass through the nanopore, translocation events are created. These events are important because they can help detect the nucleotides of the DNA strand.

Nathan's contribution to this project involved both experimental and computational methods. An experiment were done to test if the silicon nitride nanopore allow currents to go through the pore's channel with the help of electrical tension and a buffer solution. A script was written in the software Matlab to simulate estimated data and analyze them for more information by using exponential random function and a low-pass Bessel filter. The results from this script showed that it is capable of collecting and interpreting data accurately. The next step is to get events from doing experiments and analyze them with these codes. Nathan will continue helping the lab this next school year.