Department of Physics , Virginia Commonwealth University , Richmond , Virginia 23284 , United States.
J Am Chem Soc. 2019 Mar 6;141(9):3792-3796. doi: 10.1021/jacs.8b12535. Epub 2019 Feb 20.
Nanopore-based resistive pulse sensing with biological nanopores has traditionally been applied to biopolymer analysis, but more recently, interest has grown in applying the technique to characterizing water-soluble metallic clusters. This paper reports on the use of α-hemolysin (αHL) for detecting a variety of thiolate-capped gold nanoclusters. The ligands studied here are p-mercaptobenzoic acid ( p-MBA), tiopronin (TP), and thiolated PEG (S-PEG). Individual clusters trapped in the cis-side of an αHL pore for extended periods (>10 s) exhibit fluctuations between numerous substates. We compare these current steps between the three different ligands and find that they scale with the mass of the corresponding ligand, which suggests that nanopore sensing could be used to characterize intraparticle surface modifications.
基于纳米孔的电阻脉冲感应技术与生物纳米孔相结合，传统上一直应用于生物聚合物分析，但最近，人们对该技术在水溶性金属簇的特性分析中的应用产生了兴趣。本文报告了使用α-溶血素 (αHL) 来检测各种硫醇封端的金纳米簇。这里研究的配体是对巯基苯甲酸 (p-MBA)、硫普罗宁 (TP) 和巯基聚乙二醇 (S-PEG)。单个纳米簇在 αHL 孔的 cis 侧被捕获并延长时间 (>10 s) 后，会在多个亚态之间发生波动。我们比较了这三种不同配体之间的电流阶跃，并发现它们与相应配体的质量成正比，这表明纳米孔感应技术可用于表征颗粒内表面修饰。
