ELECTRICAL NOISES REDUCTION IN NANOPORES EXPERIMENTS BASED ON CONSENSUS FILTER

Nanopore has developed into an indispensable tool for single molecules experiments, where useful information about the characteristics of DNA/RNA can be obtained from the flowing of ionic current elicited by individual molecules as they traverse a single nanometer-scale aperture. However, due to the relatively high background current noise and low measurement bandwidth, it is difficult to distinguish the molecule-specific signals from the intrinsic noises of the nanopore recording systems, which impeded its application in DNA sequencing. In this paper, we present a novel consensus filter-based noise reduction approach, which considerably improves the accuracy of the noise-filtered current traces and the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The new approach is compared to the conventional Bessel filters and validated by analyzing simulated representative translocation data as well as alpha-Hemolysin (α-HL) nanopore experimental data. It is demonstrated that the high frequency noise generated by the voltage noise of the amplifier and Analog-to-Digital converter circuits (ADC) can be significantly reduced and some hidden short-lived translocation events can be recovered with satisfying accuracy beyond the conventional limitations of the Bessel filters.

Keywords:
nanopores; consensus filter; DNA sequencing; bessel filter