AlbaNova Colloquium

Driven Polymer Translocation through Nanopores

by Prof. Tapio Ala-Nissilä (Aalto)

Europe/Stockholm
Description
One of the current Grand Challenges is to develop technology for rapid and inexpensive sequencing of the human DNA. The most promising candidate for this is the idea to force DNA though a nanopore and read its sequence during the translocation process. It is thus imperative to understand the nature of this process. It turns out that the translocation dynamics of polymers though nanopores driven by external fields is a far-from-equilibrium process, which can be understood based on the tension propagation (TP) theory. In particular, the coarse grained Brownian Dynamics TP theory within the iso-flux (IFTP) assumption allows a self-consistent derivation of analytic equations of motion for the dynamics, including an explicit form for the chain length dependence of the average translocation time. In this talk I will discuss the fundamentals of the IFTP theory and its various applications theory to translocation dynamics of long semi-flexible and end-pulled polymer chains. I will also discuss recent works trying to elucidate the role of hydrodynamics and electrostatic interactions on translocation of rod-like molecules in finite and infinite cylindrical nanopores.