Journey to Angstromia
Journey to Angstromia is a section of the essay with which Kent Kemmish introduced Epic Quest Bio in 2025, and the name Molecular Reality Corporation gives to its plan of working from large pores toward small ones. The essay's section is a short history of pore sensing, from the holes of the Coulter counter to protein pores and "sub-nanometer pores through which single-stranded DNA can just barely squeeze".[1] Molecular Reality's plan retraces that history in order. Its data collection starts with pores measured in micrometers and millimeters, and its guide gives the reason in one line: "The road to the small end runs through the big end, and the big end loves ketchup."[2]
Name
The ångström is 10-10 meters, or a tenth of a nanometer, and is named after the Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström, who measured the wavelengths of light in the solar spectrum. Atoms are a few ångströms across, and the bond between two carbon atoms in diamond is 1.54 ångströms long. Angstromia is written in the essay without the ring and the umlaut. In a 2026 post Kemmish used a plainer form of the phrase, describing experiments that could proceed "with smaller and smaller 'strings' as we 'Journey to the Nanoscale', until we're actually sequencing DNA."[3]
The essay
The section follows "The Hole Enchilada", the essay's account of how Wallace and Joseph Coulter counted blood cells through a hole in cellophane in 1948, and begins where that story ends: "As decades passed, researchers figured out how to use holes thousands of times smaller, holes the size of single proteins and even smaller."[1] Its first stop is the protein pore alpha-hemolysin, "a toxin that bacteria use to punch holes in red blood cells", which in 1996 became the first pore used to detect single strands of DNA.[4] Oxford Nanopore Technologies, the essay says, "turned this trick into a multi-billion dollar business, making DNA sequencers the size of USB sticks."
Biological pores do not get the company to its goal. "They're fragile. They don't last for more than a few days," the essay says, and it ends the complaint with an image: "They're like having a key that only opens one lock, when what we need is a skeleton key for the entire molecular universe." Its alternative is the solid-state nanopore, a hole made in a synthetic membrane, which runs "from the macroscopic ruby apertures used to measure moon dust down to sub-nanometer pores". Solid-state pores, it continues, "can last indefinitely, be fabricated and regenerated in some cases using only electricity, and can be mechanically adjusted in size in realtime."
The rest of the section is a tour of results from other laboratories, credited to "heroic scientists". It mentions molecules sent back and forth through the same pore "hundreds of times" until the averaged signal can "detect differences smaller than a hydrogen atom"; pores that track proteins as they tumble and fold ("Proteins are flamboyant."); silicon quantum dots that "taste" amino acids; pores made of graphene, "a sheet of carbon just one atom thick"; gold structures that concentrate light; and DNA origami that works "like molecular bouncers, only letting certain guests through the door." It ends with a claim on the finish line: "Each breakthrough brings us closer to devices that can identify any molecule, but it's going to take Epic Quest Bio™ to reach the finish line."
From the big end
The company's own journey retraces the route. "We're starting our Epic Quest data collection with micron scale pores (and larger!)," a 2026 post explains, "aiming to establish standardized reference data from the very largest pores down to the sub-nanometer scale."[5] The largest pore in the company's posts is a hole about 2 millimeters wide, through which Kemmish and a collaborator pulled a nylon filament tied with knots and recorded a dip in the current for each knot, a demonstration of knot sequencing at the scale of string. Kemmish expected players "In the early phases of the quest (traversing the macro to the micro scale)" to invent similar demonstrations.[3]
In 2026 the company's live molecular stream used a laser-drilled pore 200 micrometers across, and its samples followed the same logic.[6] The laboratory's inventory lists ketchup "kept at 4C", with salsa and mustard not yet in solution,[7] and the guide explains that "honest stress tests use ugly samples."[2] The guide also notes that "the pores we stream today are larger than a nanometer". A pore 200 micrometers across is 200,000 nanometers across.
Stages
| Hole | Width | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Knot-sequencing macropore | about 2 mm | Nylon filament, about 2020[3] |
| Laser-drilled pore of the live stream | 200 µm | 2026 |
| Aperture of Coulter's Model A | 100 µm | Described in 1956 |
| Hole in cellulose acetate film, Coulter's second test | 76 µm | 1948 |
| Silicon pores of the company's 2018 experiments | 200 nm | A blade slid across them |
| Pore shuttered in a 2022 company figure | 100 nm | Drilled with a focused ion beam[8] |
| The company's target for adjustable apertures | below 15 nm | Not yet reached |
| Narrowest point of alpha-hemolysin | about 1.4 nm | Protein pore[9] |
| Single-stranded DNA | about 1 nm | The thing that has to squeeze through |
| One ångström | 0.1 nm | The destination |
For a longer ladder, see List of very small things.
See also
References
- ^ a b Kemmishtree (2025). "Epic Quest Bio". Molecular Reality Corporation.
- ^ a b "Keltar's Field Guide to Molecular Reality". Molecular Reality Corporation. August 2026.
- ^ a b c Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "Sequencing a string". EQBio-OS.
- ^ "Characterization of individual polynucleotide molecules using a membrane channel". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93 (24): 13770. 1996. doi:10.1073/pnas.93.24.13770.
- ^ Thucydides (March 29, 2026). "Bend it like Beckman Coulter". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Lenora Ashgrove (July 29, 2026). "Nineteen Billion Ions a Second, Live on the Internet". Signal & Noise.
- ^ Dot Kimberley (May 12, 2026). "Local Bench Streams Salt Water to the World". The Coulter Courier.
- ^ "Scientific and technical overview". Molecular Reality Corporation. December 2022.
- ^ "Structure of staphylococcal alpha-hemolysin, a heptameric transmembrane pore". Science 274 (5294): 1859-1866. 1996. doi:10.1126/science.274.5294.1859.