Professor Jia Geng, West China Medical Center, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

Single-Molecule Nanopore Sensing beyond DNA Sequencing

Biological nanopores are proteins with transmembrane pore that can be embedded in lipid bilayer. With the development of single-channel current measurement technologies, biological nanopores have been reconstituted into membranes and used for single-molecule sensing of various analytes and events such as single-molecule DNA sensing and sequencing. We deploy various strategies to engineer nanopore proteins and develop sensing strategies to improve the sensitivity for specific analytes, including small-molecule drugs, amino acids and neuron transmitters, with potential applications in nanopore protein sequencing and nanopore-based liquid biopsy.

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Professor Jia Geng received his Ph.D. from University of Cincinnati in 2012 and was a postdoctoral scholar at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before joining Sichuan University in 2015. His research focuses on single-molecule biophysics, controllable nanoscale transport of soft materials, and the development of nanopore-based biosensing and sequencing techniques for clinical diagnostics. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers, including publications in Nature, Nature Nanotechnology, Cell Host & Microbe, etc. Dr. Geng is a recipient of the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate Award from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (2015), and a Member of the Single-Molecule Biology Committee of the Chinese Biophysical Society.