Aiming at the issues of controlling the translocation speed of DNA through a solid-state nanopore and enlarging the signal-to-noise ratio of ionic current modulation, which are challenges for the application of nanopore technology in DNA detection, salt concentration gradients are applied across the nanopore to investigate their influence on the DNA translocation time and signal-to-noise ratio. Experimental data demonstrates that, in symmetric concentration conditions, both the current blockade and dwell time for A-DNA translocation through a solid-state nanopore increase along with potassium chloride concentration. When the concentration in the trans chamber is decreased from 1 to 0.1 mol/L, keeping the concentration of the cis chamber at 1 mol/L, the normalized current blockade is found to be increased by one order. The increased dwell time and enhanced signal-to-noise ratio are achieved with salt gradients across the nanopore, which can improve the sensitivity when detecting DNA samples.
The current blockade mechanism for λ -DNA translocation under electrical field is investigated through solid-state nanopores with different pore thicknesses. The conductance of a nanopore system mainly consists of the contribution of the pore and access region, and the latter becomes dominant when the nanopore thickness gradually decreases to atomic layer thickness. Based on the existing model of nanopore resistance, a simplified model which describes the relative current blockade during the X-DNA translocation through the nanopores is deduced to quantitatively present the relationship between nanopore thickness and relative current blockade. Results show that the relative current blockade is effectively increased by reducing the nanopore diameter but it decreases with the decreasing nanopore thickness. A two-stage schematic is proposed to increase the relative current blockade by setting a much smaller resistance region. Experimental results show a 21. 9% increase in the relative current blockade with the proposed schematic.
