Measuring a frequency spectrum for single-molecule interactions with a confined nanopore

Abstract

Nanopore analysis is a powerful technique for single molecule analysis by virtue of its electrochemically confined effects. As a single molecule translocates through the nanopore, the featured ionic current pattern on the time scale contains single molecule characteristics including volume, charge, and conformational properties. Although the characteristics of a single molecule in a nanopore have been written to the featured ionic current, extracting the dynamic information from a complex current trace is still a big challenge. Here, we present an applicable nanopore analysis method employing the Hilbert–Huang Transform (HHT) to study the vibrational features and interactions of a single molecule during the dynamic translocation process through the confined space of a nanopore. The HHT method is specially developed for analyzing nonlinear and non-stationary data that is highly compatible with nanopore data with a high frequency resolution. To provide proof-of-concept, we applied HHT to measure the frequency response for the wild-type (WT) aerolysin and mutant K238E aerolysin nanopores with and without the presence of poly(dA)₄, respectively. The energy–frequency–time distribution spectra demonstrate that the biological nanopore contributes greatly to the characteristics of the high frequency component (>2 kHz) in the current recording. Our results suggest that poly(dA)₄ undergoes relatively more consistent and confined interactions with K238E than WT, leading to a prolonging of the duration time. Therefore, the characteristics in frequency analysis could be regarded as an “single-molecule ionic spectrum” inside the nanopore, which encodes the detailed behaviours of single-molecule weak interactions.