Silicon Nanopore Arrays : Fabrication and Applications for DNA Sensing

Abstract: Nanopore biomolecule sensing and sequencing has emerged as a simple but powerful tool for single molecule studies over the past two decades. By elec- trophoretically driving single molecules through a nanometer-sized pore, often sitting in an insulating membrane that separates two buffer solutions, ionic current blockades can be detected to reveal rich information of the molecules, such as DNA length, protein size and conformation, even nucleic acid se- quence. Biological protein pores, as well as solid-state nanopores have been used, but both suffer from relatively low throughput due to the lack of abil- ity to scale up to a large array. In this thesis, we tackled the throughput issue from the fabrication aspect as well as from the detection aspect, aim- ing at a parallel optical single molecule sensing on an array of well-separated nanopores.From the fabrication aspect, several lithography-based self-regulating meth- ods were tested to obtain nanopore arrays in silicon membranes, including anisotropic KOH etching, thermal oxidation-induced pore shrinkage, metal- assisted etching and electrochemical etching. Among those, the most success- ful method was the electrochemical etching of silicon. By electron-beam or photo lithography, the positions of the pores were defined on a silicon mem- brane. Followed by anisotropic KOH etching, inverted pyramids were formed as etching pits. The nanopores were then formed by anodic etching of silicon in HF. Using this concept, the size of the pores does not depend on the lithog- raphy step; only the positions of pores were defined by lithography. In this way, an array of ∼ 900 pores with an average entrance diameter of 18 ± 4 nm was fabricated on a 120 μm × 120 μm membrane.From the detection aspect, parallel readout of fluorescence signals from the labelled DNA molecules while translocating through an array of nanopores was performed using a wide-field microscope with a relatively fast CMOS camera recording at 1 KHz frame rate. Statistics of duration and frequency of the translocation events were extracted and studied. It was found that the event duration decreases with rising excitation laser power. This can be attributed to a laser-induced heating effect. Simulation suggested that a sig- nificant thermal gradient was generated at the pore vicinity by the excitation laser due to photon absorption by the silicon membrane. Such temperature rise affects all mass transport in a solution via a viscosity change. The ther- mal effect has also been proven by that conductance of an array of nanopores scales with the laser power. The thermal effect on the translocation frequency has been studied systematically as well. Due to thermophoresis of DNA in a thermal gradient, the thermophoretic force serves as a repulsion force, op- posing the electrophoretic force at the pore vicinity, depleting molecules away from the pore. Because of the molecule-size-dependent thermal depletion, a size-dependent translocation frequency was observed. This can be potentially used for a high throughput molecule sorting by adjusting the balance between the thermophoretic force and the electrophoretic force.