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Nature Nanotechnology 3, 73–74 (1 February 2008) | doi:10.1038/nnano.2008.13

Nanopores: A makeover for membranes

Lane A. Baker & Sean P. Bird

A straightforward method for coating nanopore membranes with functional polymers puts a new face on an old friend by enabling the size and adsorption properties of the pores to be easily tuned. A nanopore is an enclosed channel, with a diameter of the order of several to hundreds of nanometres, that spans the thickness of a membrane material. Bare nanopores can be used as size-selective filters simply because small molecules or particles can pass through them, whereas larger ones will not.