High-throughput optical sensing of nucleic acids in a nanopore array

Protein nanopores such as α-hemolysin and MspA can potentially be used to sequence long strands of DNA quickly and at low cost. In order to provide high-speed sequencing, large arrays of nanopores are required that allow the nanopores to individually addressed, but current nanopore sequencing methods rely on ionic current measurements and such methods are likely to prove difficult to scale up. Here, we show that, by optically encoding the ionic flux through protein nanopores, the discrimination of nucleic acid sequences and the detection of sequence-specific nucleic acid binding events can be parallelized. We make optical recordings at a density of ~10(4) nanopores per mm(2) in a single droplet interface bilayer. Nanopore blockades can discriminate between DNAs with sub-pA equivalent resolution, and specific miRNA sequences can be identified by differences in unzipping kinetics. By creating an array of 2500 bilayers with a micro-patterned hydrogel chip, we are also able to load different samples into specific bilayers, suitable for high-throughput nanopore recording.