Lipid bilayer stabilization allows nanopore sensing to step outside the lab.Protein nanopores have a reputation for being fragile. So, despite the great applications that researchers imagine-including the detection of environmental pollutants or chemical weapons and ultrarapid DNA sequencing-their practical use has been limited. Now, Xiao-feng Kang, Hagan Bayley, and colleagues at Texas A&M University and the University of Oxford (U.K.) have found a solution. The team recently introduced a storable, portable bilayer chip containing a single protein nanopore (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2007, 129, 4701-4705).
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