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  • Perspective
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Three decades of nanopore sequencing

Nature Biotechnology volume 34, pages 518–524 (2016)Cite this article

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A long-held goal in sequencing has been to use a voltage-biased nanoscale pore in a membrane to measure the passage of a linear, single-stranded (ss) DNA or RNA molecule through that pore. With the development of enzyme-based methods that ratchet polynucleotides through the nanopore, nucleobase-by-nucleobase, measurements of changes in the current through the pore can now be decoded into a DNA sequence using an algorithm. In this Historical Perspective, we describe the key steps in nanopore strand-sequencing, from its earliest conceptualization more than 25 years ago to its recent commercialization and application.

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Figure 1: Nanopore sequencing.
Figure 2

Marina Corral Spence/Nature Publishing Group

Figure 3: D.D.'s notebook.
Figure 4: Sensing regions in MspA and α-hemolysin.
Figure 5: Nanopore researchers at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology Meeting, Marco Island, Florida, 2012.
Figure 6

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Acknowledgements

The authors are funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health award numbers HG006321, HG007827 and HG003703.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, USA

    David Deamer & Mark Akeson

  2. Department of Molecular & Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Daniel Branton

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  1. David Deamer
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  2. Mark Akeson
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  3. Daniel Branton
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to David Deamer.

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Competing interests

All of the authors are members of the Technology Advisory Board of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Oxford, UK, for which they receive compensation, including stock options of unknown value that may exceed $10,000. They are inventors on the following nanopore sequencing–related US patents owned by their respective universities: 5,795,782; 6,015,714; 6,267,193; 6,267,872; 6,362,002; 6,464,842; 6,428,959; 6,673,615; 6,746,594; 6,783,643; 6,936,433; 7,118,657; 7,189,503; 7,238,485; 7,258,838; 7,253,434; 7,466,069; 7,435,353; 7,468,271; 7,582,490; 7,803,607; 7,846,738; 7,993,538; 7,969,079; 8,092,697; 8,726,465.

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Deamer, D., Akeson, M. & Branton, D. Three decades of nanopore sequencing. Nat Biotechnol 34, 518–524 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3423

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