Nanopore printing
| Nanopore printing | |
|---|---|
 Diagram of a pore in graphene made by removing 20 carbon atoms, with no carbon left hanging by a single bond at its edge | |
| Classification | Nanopore fabrication |
| Analytes | Any that pass through the pores made |
| Inventor | Molecular Reality Corporation (proposal) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Related | Controlled dielectric breakdown; Tesla coil lighter pore fabrication |
Nanopore printing was Molecular Reality Corporation's name for making nanopores inside the cartridges of its game console with pulses of electricity, so that players at home could make many kinds of pore and test each one. The company proposed it in its December 2022 technical overview, which expected it to be "one of the most fun and interesting elements for players to explore, and one of the most physically relatable".[1] It was never carried out. The company later decided to make its pores centrally, on wafers, and to send them out finished.
Plan
Under the heading "Nanopore Printing", the overview promised: "In situ electrical fabrication of a vast variety of different nanopores (particularly graphene pores) will be done with an electronic upgrade and an in-cartridge mechanism." The cartridges were those of the demonpore 64, a console whose pores sat in swappable cartridges, and the upgrade was to build on "hardware we've designed, built, and tested internally", allowing "many different nanopores to be 'printed' within each individual pore cartridge".[1]
Players were to find the best pores by trial. By 2022 the company had "made, tested, and/or sourced a few dozen different types of pores", in "intrinsic silicon, doped silicon, borosilicate glass, quartz, fused silica, ABS, Teflon, polyacrylate, PDMS, polyurethane, ruby, silicon nitride, boron nitride, and few-layer graphene". "At pennies for each combined cartridge/pore assembly", players could work through "a huge matrix of materials, surface chemistries, pore geometries, methods of formation, sizes, volumetric shapes, and aspect ratios" and assemble "the first comprehensive catalog of direct comparisons between different ss-nanopores". The section's last sentence calls the resulting data "a very rich vein to explore with deep learning reinforcement models".[1]
Graphene
Graphene is a sheet of carbon one atom thick, about 0.34 nm, so a hole in it is about as short as a channel can be. DNA was first passed through graphene pores in 2010.[2] A pore in graphene is a gap in a lattice of hexagons, and its shape depends on exactly which atoms are missing. The overview cited a count of "~180,000 potentially chemically stable graphene nanopores with fewer than 20 carbon atoms removed from the hexagonal lattice".[1] The study behind the figure enumerated the shapes. Removing 6 atoms gives 12 possible pores and removing 20 gives 11.7 million; discarding the shapes that leave atoms or bonds dangling at the edge reduces the second figure to about 184,000.[3]
The edge of such a pore runs in zigzag or armchair patterns of carbon atoms. Measuring many printed pores, the overview predicted, "will reveal the landscape of analyte-graphene edge interactions during translocation".[1]
Methods
Electrical methods make a pore in the liquid, with no ion beam. In controlled dielectric breakdown, described in 2014, several volts across a silicon nitride membrane a few tens of nanometers thick drive a small leakage current through the insulator until it breaks down at one point; cutting the voltage when the current jumps leaves a single pore a few nanometers wide.[4] The founder's patent on stacked pores makes its holes with "a 9V battery" applied to three layers of graphene in pulses of about ten seconds.[5]
Nanopores "can be made in so many different ways, some of which are very simple to understand", the overview noted. Its example, "one that we've played with ourselves", used the spark of a "~$20 Tesla coil lighter", with which a 2019 study had made pores in thin silicon nitride.[1][6] In 2026 the founder described the attempt: "Yes, we actually tried this." The lighter, he wrote, "might open up making pores through membranes too thick" for a battery. "Results were messy", and after "one night or two of tinkering", "we may or may not have made pores, but it's worth trying again."[7] See Tesla coil lighter pore fabrication.
Fate
The company's attempt at a dedicated unit was the Burnerphone, a compact instrument for making pores by dielectric breakdown. Asked whether the older MR1 handheld could do "nanopore printing", the company's chatbot answered: "That's what the BurnerPhone will do, but... hush..."[8] The company then stopped planning to sell the unit, citing existing intellectual property on dielectric breakdown, and chose to make its pores centrally on wafers.[8] The MR1 Nanopore Reader, the open design it published in October 2026, clamps a finished chip in its cartridge.[9]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f "Scientific and technical overview". Molecular Reality Corporation. December 2022.
- ^ "Graphene as a subnanometre trans-electrode membrane". Nature 467 (7312): 190-193. 2010. doi:10.1038/nature09379.
- ^ "Enumerating stable nanopores in graphene and their geometrical properties using the combinatorics of hexagonal lattices". Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling 63 (3): 870-881. 2023. doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.2c01306.
- ^ "Nanopore fabrication by controlled dielectric breakdown". PLoS ONE 9 (3): e92880. 2014. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0092880.
- ^ "US10908144B2: Stacks of coaligned nanopores and fabrication and uses thereof". Google Patents. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ "Push-Button Method To Create Nanopores Using a Tesla-Coil Lighter". ACS Omega 4 (1): 226-230. 2019. doi:10.1021/acsomega.8b02660.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "making pores with a $20 Tesla coil lighter". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ "MR1 Nanopore Reader". GitHub. October 16, 2026.