TY - JOUR AU - Puebla-Hellmann, Gabriel AU - Mayor, Marcel AU - Lörtscher, Emanuel PY - 2016/06/29 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Functional Nanopores: A Solid-state Concept for Artificial Reaction Compartments and Molecular Factories JF - CHIMIA JA - Chimia VL - 70 IS - 6 SE - Scientific Articles DO - 10.2533/chimia.2016.432 UR - https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/view/2016_432 SP - 432 AB - On the road towards the long-term goal of the NCCR Molecular Systems Engineering to create artificial molecular factories, we aim at introducing a compartmentalization strategy based on solid-state silicon technology targeting zeptoliter reaction volumes and simultaneous electrical contact to ensembles of well-oriented molecules. This approach allows the probing of molecular building blocks under a controlled environment prior to their use in a complex molecular factory. Furthermore, these ultra-sensitive electrical conductance measurements allow molecular responses to a variety of external triggers to be used as sensing and feedback mechanisms. So far, we demonstrate the proof-of-concept by electrically contacting self-assembled mono-layers of alkane-dithiols as an established test system. Here, the molecular films are laterally constrained by a circular dielectric confinement, forming a so-called 'nanopore'. Device yields above 85% are consistently achieved down to sub-50 nm nanopore diameters. This generic platform will be extended to create distributed, cascaded reactors with individually addressable reaction sites, including interconnecting micro-fluidic channels for electrochemical communication among nanopores and sensing sites for reaction control and feedback. In this scientific outlook, we will sketch how such a solid-state nanopore concept can be used to study various aspects of molecular compounds tailored for operation in a molecular factory. ER -