Concurrent analysis of electronic and ionic nanopore signals: blockade mean and height

Abstract

Electronic and ionic current signals detected concurrently by 2D molybdenum disulfide nanopores are analysed in view of detecting (bio)molecules electrophoretically driven through these nanopores. The passage of the molecules, giving rise to translocation events in the nanopores, can be assigned to specific drops in the current signals, the blockades. Such blockades are observed in both the electronic and the ionic signals. In this work, we analyze both signals separately and together by choosing specific features and applying both unsupervised and supervised learning. Two blockade features, the height and the mean, are found to strongly influence the clustering and the classification of the nanopore data, respectively. At the same time, the concurrent learning of both the electronic and ionic signatures enhance the predictability of the learning models, i.e. the nanopore read-out efficiency. The interpretation of these findings provides an intuitive understanding in optimizing the read-out schemes for enhancing the accuracy of nanopore sequencers in view of an error-free biomolecular sensing.

Keywords

• nanopores
• DNA
• machine learning
• ionic current
• electronic current
• neural networks