Genopore
| Genopore | |
|---|---|
| Industry | Proteomics, nanopore sensing |
| Founders | Amit Meller and others |
| Headquarters | Yavne, Israel |
| Products | Digital protein identification and quantitation system (in development) |
| Website | genopore.com |
Genopore is a company in Yavne, Israel, that is developing a system to identify and count proteins one molecule at a time. Its site describes a "digital protein identification and quantitation system" that combines "chemo-selective protein labeling, solid-state nanopore translocation, and AI-powered optical readout".[1] The technology comes from the laboratory of Amit Meller at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, and the site lists Meller as a co-founder and director.[1] It names no finished instrument.
The Meller laboratory
Meller was first author of a paper of February 2000, "Rapid nanopore discrimination between single polynucleotide molecules", from Harvard laboratories that included the group of Daniel Branton. It showed that a pore could tell strands of different composition apart.[2] In 2010 his own group reported that a salt gradient across the membrane raises the capture rate of unlabeled DNA, an effect the authors called electrostatic focusing.[3]
Cysteine fingerprinting
A protein passes through a solid-state pore too fast to read. The group's paper in Nature Nanotechnology of September 24, 2025, "Full-length protein classification via cysteine fingerprinting in solid-state nanopores", slows it down by changing the protein.[4] The proteins are first denatured. Short oligonucleotides are then attached by click chemistry to their cysteine residues, which occur in about 97 percent of human proteins.[4][5] The tags are negatively charged, so they raise the capture rate tenfold compared with native proteins. They also produce a "stick-slip" motion in a pore about 4 nanometers wide, in which the protein alternately clings to the wall and slides, and that slows its passage by more than 20-fold.[4][5]
Each protein then leaves a pattern of ion-current pulses in time. The authors modeled the mechanism with all-atom molecular dynamics and finite element simulations, which involved collaborators at the University of Illinois and Rice University, and trained a supervised classifier on the pulses. A small number of events was enough to identify a single protein with near-perfect accuracy, and in a mixed sample the method told apart two isoforms of VEGF-A, VEGF-165 and VEGF-121, which the paper calls relevant to cancer diagnostics.[4][5] The paper states that the technique needs neither protein-specific antibodies nor motor proteins.[4]
The method names a protein from its pattern and does not read the amino acid sequence. Sequencing is the aim of Nanopore protein sequencing, which Glyphic Biotechnologies and others pursue.
Company
The paper reads the ion current. Genopore's site describes a readout that is optical.[1] The site lists the advantages of the method as simple sample preparation, low-cost reagents, wide coverage, full-length protein reads and results in under an hour. The Technion's account says that the team is working toward a "point-of-care platform" in the long term.[1][5]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d "Genopore". Genopore. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ Meller, A.; Nivon, L.; Brandin, E.; Golovchenko, J.; Branton, D. (2000). "Rapid nanopore discrimination between single polynucleotide molecules". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (3): 1079-1084. doi:10.1073/pnas.97.3.1079.
- ^ Wanunu, M.; Morrison, W.; Rabin, Y.; Grosberg, A. Y.; Meller, A. (2010). "Electrostatic focusing of unlabelled DNA into nanoscale pores using a salt gradient". Nature Nanotechnology 5 (2): 160-165. doi:10.1038/nnano.2009.379. PMID 20023645.
- ^ a b c d e Soni, Neeraj et al. (2025). "Full-length protein classification via cysteine fingerprinting in solid-state nanopores". Nature Nanotechnology 20: 1482-1490. doi:10.1038/s41565-025-02016-w.
- ^ a b c d "Without antibodies and without amplification: Ultra-fast identification of whole proteins using a technology developed at the Technion". Technion. November 6, 2025.