Ultrashort single-walled carbon nanotubes in a lipid bilayer as a new nanopore sensor

An important issue in nanopore sensing is to construct stable and versatile sensors that can discriminate analytes with minute differences. Here we report a means of creating nanopores that comprise ultrashort single-walled carbon nanotubes inserted into a lipid bilayer. We investigate the ion transport and DNA translocation through single-walled carbon nanotube nanopores and find that our results are fundamentally different from previous studies using much longer single-walled carbon nanotubes. Furthermore, we utilize the new single-walled carbon nanotube nanopores to selectively detect modified 5-hydroxymethylcytosine in single-stranded DNA, which may have implications in screening specific genomic DNA sequences. This new nanopore platform can be integrated with many unique properties of carbon nanotubes and might be useful in molecular sensing such as DNA-damage detection, nanopore DNA sequencing and other nanopore-based applications. Nanopore sensors are a promising tool for the controlled detection of a range of possible substrates. Here the authors describe a nanopore sensor based on short single-walled carbon nanotubes inserted into a lipid bilayer, with modified sensing properties compared to longer nanotubes.