Hydrophobically gated memristive nanopores for neuromorphic applications.

Signal transmission in the brain relies on voltage-gated ion channels, which exhibit the electrical behaviour of memristors, resistors with memory. State-of-the-art technologies currently employ semiconductor-based neuromorphic approaches, which have already demonstrated their efficacy in machine learning systems. However, these approaches still cannot match performance achieved by biological neurons in terms of energy efficiency and size.

An atomistically informed multiscale approach to the intrusion and extrusion of water in hydrophobic nanopores.

Understanding intrusion and extrusion in nanoporous materials is a challenging multiscale problem of utmost importance for applications ranging from energy storage and dissipation to water desalination and hydrophobic gating in ion channels. Including atomistic details in simulations is required to predict the overall behavior of such systems because the statics and dynamics of these processes depend sensitively on microscopic features of the pore, such as the surface hydrophobicity, geometry, and charge distribution, and on the composition of the liquid. On the other hand, the transitions between the filled (intruded) and empty (extruded) states are rare events that often require long simulation times, which are difficult to achieve with standard atomistic simulations.

Optimization of the wetting-drying characteristics of hydrophobic metal organic frameworks via crystallite size: The role of hydrogen bonding between intruded and bulk liquid.

Hypothesis: The behavior of Heterogeneous Lyophobic Systems (HLSs) comprised of a lyophobic porous material and a corresponding non-wetting liquid is affected by a variety of different structural parameters of the porous material. Dependence on exogenic properties such as crystallite size is desirable for system tuning as they are much more facilely modified. We explore the dependence of intrusion pressure and intruded volume on crystallite size, testing the hypothesis that the connection between internal cavities and bulk water facilitates intrusion via hydrogen bonding, a phenomenon that is magnified in smaller crystallites with a larger surface/volume ratio.

Confinement effects on the dynamics of a rigid particle in a nanochannel.

The transport of nanoparticles in confined geometries plays a crucial role in several technological applications ranging from nanopore sensors to filtration membranes. Here we describe a Brownian approach to simulate the motion of a rigid-body nanoparticle of an arbitrary shape under confinement. A quaternion formulation is used for the nanoparticle orientation, and the corresponding overdamped Langevin equation, completed by the proper fluctuation-dissipation relation, is derived.

Amyloid Growth, Inhibition, and Real-Time Enzymatic Degradation Revealed with Single Conical Nanopore.

Amyloid fibrils are involved in several neurodegenerative diseases. However, because of their polymorphism and low concentration, they are challenging to assess in real-time with conventional techniques. Here, we present a new approach for the characterization of the intermediates: protofibrils and "end-off" aggregates which are produced during the amyloid formation.

Analysis of Pore Formation and Protein Translocation Using Large Biological Nanopores.

This paper describes the analysis of pore formation and detection of a single protein molecule using a large nanopore among five different pore-forming proteins. We demonstrate that the identification of appropriate pores for nanopore sensing can be achieved by classifying the channel current signals and performing noise analysis. Through these analyses, we selected a perforin nanopore from the membrane attack complex/perforin superfamily and attempted to use it to detect the granzyme B protein, a serine protease.