Nanopore Device for Single-Molecule Sensing Method and Its Application

Nanopore analysis is very promising for a single-molecule sensing platform. The feature of nanopore platform is a simple, high-throughput single-molecule/particle detection of a wide range of analytes at low-cost at single-molecule level. The single-molecule sensing ability of nanopore devices have been utilized not only for single-molecule detection of DNA, RNA, protein, peptide and carbohydrates, and so on, but also for sequencing of DNA, RNA peptide and so on. Due to recent progress on the improvement of selectivity, molecular control, and fabrication technique, the nanopore platform became “smarter”. Therefore, the applicability of nanopore–sensing methodology is expanding not only for basic research fields but also for medical applications, such as disease diagnosis, drug screening, and virus detection. Herein this chapter, background of nanopore studies (Sect. 11.1), principle of nanopore sensing (Sect. 11.2), the nanopore-fabrication technique (Sect. 11.3), nanopore based detection and molecule/particle sensing (Sect. 11.4), the selective and accuracy improvement studies of nanopore-sensing (Sect. 11.5), the application of nanopore sensing (Sect. 11.6), recent novel nanopore platform studies (Sect. 11.7), and the summary and future of the nanopore-sensing method (Sect. 11.8) are introduced.