Identification (biology)

Nanotechnology

Aerolysin

Biological system

Biology

Gene

Biophysics

Nanopore

Nanopore sequencing

Peptide sequence

Chemistry

Materials science

Peptide

Sequence (biology)

DNA sequencing

Botany

Computational biology

Amino acid

Biochemistry

Virulence

Nature Communications

There are still unmet needs in finding new technologies for biomedical diagnostic and industrial applications. A technology allowing the analysis of size and sequence of short peptide molecules of only few molecular copies is still challenging. The fast, low-cost and label-free single-molecule nanopore technology could be an alternative for addressing these critical issues. Here, we demonstrate that the wild-type aerolysin nanopore enables the size-discrimination of several short uniformly charged homopeptides, mixed in solution, with a single amino acid resolution. Our system is very sensitive, allowing detecting and characterizing a few dozens of peptide impurities in a high purity commercial peptide sample, while conventional analysis techniques fail to do so.

Identification of single amino acid differences in uniformly charged homopolymeric peptides with aerolysin nanopore