Meller lab won a grant for development of an automated system for nanopore fabrication.
The European Union is allocating another grant to our lab at the Technion, to accelerate innovative technology for drilling nanometric pores in thin membranes using a laser beam.
The final device will be used for the analysis of a single molecule for the benefit of rapid diagnosis of diseases including COVID-19.
More information : ERC website
Congratulations to Karawan for winning the Israeli cross country championship.
Karawan Halabi, an MSc student in our lab, won the Israeli cross country championships for the third time in a row with the result: 41:27 minutes.
The race took place at Yarkon Park, Tel Aviv.
The race was challenging as it contained uphills, downhills, and puddles while running on grass.
Congratulations Karawan!
Nitza Burck paper in Clinical Chemistry
Nanopore identification of single nucleotide mutations in circulating tumor DNA by multiplexed ligation:
In this paper we introduce a new and transformative technology, based on sophisticated solid state electro-optical Nanopore biosensors, to enable a highly practical method for DNA mutation identification and quantification.
This proof of principle study demonstrates how coupling our technology together with Ligation based SNV detection could potentially be used for clinical diagnosis of cancer biomarkers, especially relevant for early diagnosis of the disease. By permitting high degree of multiplexing of single nucleotide mutation samples and extremely high accuracy, our approach could offer a rapid and low-cost technique for ctDNA analysis that completely circumvents PCR amplification and library preparation.
Shilo Ohayon presents a talk at the: HealthIL - BME Satellite Event: Engineering the Future of Healthcare
Shilo Ohayon presented the lab research and advancement in single-molecule protein identification and quantification technologies. The 10 min talk was aimed at the general audience and reviewed the latest developments in single-molecule sensing, optical sensing using nanotechnologies such as nanopores and submicron channels.
The talk briefly explained the foundations these technologies are based upon and the importance of this technology have on digital health.
In the future, we believe our technology could assist fast and accurate diagnostic in the community and better monitoring of patients.
Yana Rozevsky presents a talk at the: HealthIL - BME Satellite Event: Engineering the Future of Healthcare
Dr. yana Rozevsky a postdoc fellow in our group presented a talk at HealthIL - BME Satellite Event: Engineering the Future of Healthcare, entitled: An RNA based technology for digital patient diagnosis. She described our nanopore-based technology developed for detecting RNA viral loads and cancer load in vitro and clinical samples. Our results have recently been published in ACS Nano (https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.0c06375). We demonstrated the sensitivity and feasibility of our technique to detect low levels of RNA, beyond the current gold-standard approach, RT-qPCR. We showed accordance between our nanopore-based approach to RT-qPCR result in one clinical sample as an example. We currently focusing on developing a full hands-free lab-on-chip device for single RNA molecule analysis. In the future, we hope that this technology can provide broadly accessed diagnostic devices for digital health use at the point of care. Specifically, we hope that it will be used to combat the coronavirus pandemic and other RNA based viruses by providing early and accurate on-site sensing of the pathogens’ RNA.
Our work on nanopore sensing of ITP-focused analytes is out now in Nanoscale
Microfluidic device for coupling isotachophoretic sample focusing with nanopore single-molecule sensing
Nanopore sensing remains challenging at low target concentrations, where the detection rate is limited by slow diffusion of analytes into the sensing volume. In this work, we show that an electrokinetic preconcentration method called isotachophoresis (ITP) can be used to deliver a highly concentrated zone of analytes to a solid-state nanopore. The key to ITP-nanopore sensing lies in the ability to electrically decouple the two modes to avoid damaging the fragile dielectric membrane. By choosing electrolyte conditions that enable both efficient focusing and sensing, and by implementing electrical switching in a custom microfluidic device, we show that ITP focusing can enhance the event rate by over 300 times compared to free diffusion.