The success of nanopore sequencers for DNA has inspired extensive research on proteins. However, when moving to proteins some major challenges remain, among them: 1) DNA bases are just 4 against the amino acids which are 20; (2) spatial and temporal resolution (sensitivity) to discriminate single amino acids within the same molecule. In this context, label-free optical analysis based on plasmonic enhancement shows great promises. In fact, plasmonic nanopores can confine and amplifying the local electromagnetic field into the pore (challenge #2). The confinement improves the spatial resolution while the amplification increases the sensitivity. Notably, Raman spectroscopy provides unique molecular fingerprints to discriminate amino acids (challenge #1). We show our latest results on extreme plasmonic nanopores combined with Raman Spectroscopy for amino acids identification and sequencing at single molecule level in label-free. We acknowledge support from Horizon 2020 (ProID GA 964363).
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