Jeff Nivala from the University of Washington presented at London Calling 2019 on “Multiplex direct quantification of barcoded protein reporters on a MinION.” Nivala explained that they have been working on single-molecule protein sequencing with a nanopore… focusing on proteins! The team developed an “unfoldase” mechanism to translocate proteins through nanopores. Their goal is protein sequencing. They mentioned that it is possible to tag proteins to be easier to detect. It is also possible to create reporter proteins to facilitate sequencing. However, there are limited fluorescent labels due to spectral overlap. Nivala has created Tags Engineered as Reporters (NTERs) that have charged tails. With this approach, you can load up to twenty orthogonal barcodes from cultures and directly sequence them. The barcodes are read and interpreted with machine learning algorithms with varying accuracy. You can use this to measure gene expression of reporters over time. What a fantastic application. I hope to learn more about what Nivala and the team are developing. Since this talk was in 2019, I wonder what the status of this is now.
