De Novo Design of a Nanopore for Single-molecule Detection that Incorporates a β-hairpin Peptide

Abstract

De novo protein design has emerged as a method to manipulate the primary structure for the development of artificial proteins and peptides with desired functionality. This paper describes the de novo design of a pore-forming peptide that has a β-hairpin structure and assembles to form a stable nanopore in a bilayer lipid membrane. We designed two kinds of peptides, SV28: forming multidispersely-sized nanopore and SVG28: monodispersely-sized nanopore, and succeeded to detect single molecule DNAs and polypeptides. Such de novo design of a β-hairpin peptide has the potential to create artificial nanopores, which can be adjust size to a target molecule.