The Hole World

The Hole World is an interactive map of the research groups and companies that work on nanopores and related molecular sensors, published by Molecular Reality Corporation in September 2026. Its title bar describes it as an "atlas of molecular-sensing R&D" covering "solid-state & protein nanopores, 2D sensors, molecular electronics".^[1] The build of September 26, 2026 holds 2,112 entries. Each is a marker on a dark world map, drawn over an animated background called the molecular ocean, and each carries a small schematic of the kind of pore or sensor the group works on, a set of drawings described in this encyclopedia as pore art.

Software assembled the atlas from the public scientific literature, and the page says so on every screen: "Auto-assembled atlas of research groups and companies working on molecular sensing." A correction form is attached to every entry. Its prompt lists the mistakes the authors expected to receive: "wrong location, closed lab, not actually a nanopore group".^[1]

The atlas comes out of an eight-stage program. It starts from a short hand-made list of known groups, searches PubMed for further papers, mines the authors' affiliations, separates groups that share a name, filters and ranks what it found, geocodes the survivors, attaches papers and videos, and finally writes the files that the page reads. Those files and the page itself are dated September 26, 2026.^[2]

According to the program's log for that build, PubMed answered 186 requests with 42,468 article identifiers. Europe PMC supplied 1,407 preprints in 679 requests, a geocoding service received 2,181 queries, and 258 of 1,087 attempts to download open-access papers failed. Seven requests went to arXiv. All seven failed.^[a][3]

Holes have a long run in the company's writing. The founder's essay introducing Epic Quest Bio heads its story of the Coulter counter "THE HOLE ENCHILADA",^[4] and a post of March 2026 calls a hoped-for result the Holey Grail.^[5] In the company's field guide a nanopore is "an object you build, then photograph, then hope".^[6] The Hole World applies the word to geography, and its loading screen reads "Charting the hole world".^[1]

On opening, the map centers on 22°N 12°E and allows zoom levels 1 to 9. Land is drawn in teal outline on dark navy from the public Natural Earth data set. Behind it, the molecular ocean changes with the zoom level: drifting molecules when the whole planet is in view, a cell membrane at middle zooms and a scrolling trace of ionic current over a single city.^[1]

Marker shapes give the kind of organization: a ring for an academic group, a hexagon for a company, a square for a national laboratory or an instrument maker, and a diamond for a consortium, of which the build contains none. Color gives the group's main research focus, using the eight-color palette that Masataka Okabe and Kei Ito designed to stay distinguishable to readers with color blindness.^[7] Nearby markers merge into numbered clusters, which take the color of the most common focus among their members, and 38 entries chosen as flagships pulse.

"Planet", the first button in the title bar, swaps the map for a slowly rotating globe; it stops when grabbed, starts again four seconds after release, and is hidden on screens narrower than 720 pixels. "Data" opens statistics about the build. "Filters" opens a sidebar with a search box ("name, PI, institution, city…"), check boxes for the kind of organization, a country list, and buttons for research focus and for the 14 most common analytes.^[1]

Clicking a marker opens a card. It gives the group's name and institution, badges such as "flagship" or "unverified", the pore drawing, the city, the names of the principal investigators, an estimated headcount, a publication count, and links to a website, a PubMed search, open-access papers and videos. A "Media" button opens a window of "papers & talks", with up to eight papers, each with a thumbnail and the opening of its abstract, beside up to six recorded talks. Arrows step through whatever entries match the current filters, and every entry has a permanent address.^[1]

Academic groups make up 1,596 of the 2,112 entries. There are 311 companies, 190 national laboratories and 15 instrument makers, among them Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Izon Science, Nanion Technologies, Molecular Devices and Elements srl of Rome, which made the amplifier on the company's own live molecular stream.^[3] Molecular Reality Corporation has no entry.

China leads the country count with 596 entries, followed by the United States with 432, Germany with 127, Japan with 85 and the United Kingdom with 65; 36 entries have no country at all. By research focus, a general "sensing platform" is the largest group (1,198 entries), ahead of solid-state pores (883), two-dimensional materials (624), protein pores (617) and theory and simulation (535). DNA is named as an analyte for 1,339 entries and protein for 1,205.^[3]

The build grades its own certainty. Only 97 entries are rated high; 754 are medium, and the 1,261 rated low, 60 percent of the atlas, carry the badge "unverified". The data panel lists 447 entries as needing verification. Most of them, 391, are flagged as a "thin_group"; 33 are a "weak_surname_proxy".^[b][3]

Only 916 entries are placed at the city of their institution. Another 48 have no coordinates and do not appear on the map. When the program could not find a city, it put the entry at the geometric center of its country, and 1,148 entries were placed that way.^[3] As a result, the atlas's largest settlements are points where no laboratory stands:

Gansu is the most populous place in the atlas. Its residents include a dairy company from the neighboring province of Shaanxi, listed on the strength of a 2026 paper on using a nanopore biosensor to establish whether milk is authentic.^[3] The correction form's first suggested complaint is "wrong location".

Once the data is more than 30 days old, the statistics panel says how old it is.^[1] The papers attached to each entry come from PubMed records, and their links have not all been checked. The first entry in the file, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, lists a 2026 paper on detecting microRNA by machine learning. In the Media window, the "DOI" link beside its title opens "Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition", a 1998 paper on reading handwritten digits.^[3][8]

Anyone may send a correction. The status bar ends with a button marked "report an error", which opens the form with the subject "general (the atlas itself)".^[1]

• List of nanopore research groups
• List of nanopore companies
• History of nanopore sequencing
• List of holes
• List of Molecular Reality Corporation puns