Exploring How the Capture Process Affects the Translocation of Polymers through Nanopores

The translocation of polymers across membranes through nanopores has received a great deal of attention in recent years. This work is motivated by applications such as sequencing DNA and also characterizing and sorting biopolymers by size. While the great majority of this work has focused on the translocation process itself (ie, when the polymer is in and passing through the pore), details such as the conformation of the polymer when it arrives at the pore are critical for real-world applications. In this talk I will present results from a simulation study of the capture of semiflexible polymers by nanopores and demonstrate how dynamics that yield non-equilibrium conformations affect the translocation process. The impact of these results will be demonstrated by presenting simulation and experimental results for nanofluidic devices that are designed to sort and count biopolymers. These will include having many nanopores in series connected by nano- or micro-channels and DNA passing through a nano-filtered nanopore device.