Pore art
 The fourteen drawings, rendered from the atlas's own code | |
| Years active | 2026 to present |
|---|---|
| Location | The Hole World |
| Medium | Scalable Vector Graphics, 120 by 120 units |
| Works | 2,112 |
| Subjects | 15 archetypes, 14 of them drawn |
Pore art is the set of small schematic drawings in The Hole World, the atlas of molecular-sensing research published by Molecular Reality Corporation in September 2026. Every one of the atlas's 2,112 entries carries one, showing the kind of nanopore or sensor the group works on. The drawings are not stored as pictures. The reader's browser draws each one from a named archetype when the entry is opened, from a membrane of silicon nitride with a hole in it to a sheet of graphene, a plate of DNA origami or a page of equations.[1]
Style
Each drawing is a square of 120 units with rounded corners, a dark navy ground and a thin border in an accent color. The accent is the color of the group's main research focus, the same color that marks the group on the map. A label of up to 48 characters may sit across the top and a note of up to 64 characters across the bottom, both in the Fira Sans typeface. Membranes are drawn as a grey bar with a row of lipid heads along each face, the arrangement of a real lipid bilayer; a hole is a dark gap, and the sensing spot is often a single pale blue dot.[1]
Subjects
The atlas data names 15 archetypes; the drawing code defines 14. Its six "nanochannel" entries are drawn as silicon nitride.[a]
| Archetype | Drawing | Entries |
|---|---|---|
| Silicon nitride | A grey slab with a conical hole, labelled "solid-state SiN" | 811 |
| Graphene | Four rows of ten atoms with a ringed hole | 410 |
| Theory | Four wavy field lines, a dashed axis and the expression "∂²ψ/∂z² + …", labelled "MD / theory" | 268 |
| Nanowire transistor | A channel with four receptor stalks | 164 |
| Plasmonic | A metal film with a hole and a cone of light above and below | 117 |
| Glass nanopipette | A tapered glass tube | 97 |
| Tunneling junction | Two pointed electrodes, with a dashed strand of DNA passing between them | 92 |
| Engineered protein | A protein barrel with three yellow stars for mutations | 66 |
| Alpha-hemolysin | A funnel in a bilayer | 33 |
| DNA origami | A plate with eight staple loops and a hole | 25 |
| MoS₂ | Three layers with a hole, labelled "MoS₂ FET sensor" | 16 |
| Nanochannel | No drawing of its own | 6 |
| Hybrid | A protein pore seated in a solid-state hole | 4 |
| CsgG | A barrel of nine subunits | 2 |
| MspA | A barrel in a bilayer | 1 |
The single MspA is a group in Seattle, labelled "MspA + phi29" with the note "Enzyme-ratcheted DNA sequencing". One of the two CsgG drawings belongs to Oxford Nanopore Technologies, labelled "CsgG + motor".[2] The comments in the drawing code describe MspA as a "mushroom-shaped beta-barrel" and alpha-hemolysin as a "7-subunit funnel".[b]
Attribution
The archetype of each entry comes from the pore types that the atlas's software found in the group's papers. Curated entries carry hand-written labels; entries assembled automatically carry generic ones, and the most common label in the atlas is "SiN pore", on 604 drawings. Seventy entries are drawn as silicon nitride although their notes name a protein pore. One of them, a dairy company listed for a paper on testing milk, appears as a silicon nitride slab labelled "SiN pore" above the note "α-hemolysin (α-HL) nanopore".[2]
Some subjects are portraits of instruments. Molecular Devices and HEKA Elektronik, which make patch-clamp amplifiers, are drawn as glass pipettes, the tool that patch clamp recording uses. Elements srl, the maker of the amplifier on Molecular Reality's live molecular stream, is drawn as an engineered protein barrel with three mutation stars, labelled "8-channel arrays".[2]
See also
Notes
- ^ The code makes the substitution twice: once by falling back to silicon nitride for any archetype it does not know, and again in the next line, which checks for "nanochannel" by name.
- ^ The crystal structure of alpha-hemolysin, published in 1996, described the pore as a mushroom-shaped heptamer; the 2004 structure of MspA described an octameric goblet.[3][4]
References
- ^ a b "The Hole World: Molecular Sensing Atlas". Molecular Reality Corporation. September 26, 2026.
- ^ a b c "The Hole World: build metadata". Molecular Reality Corporation. September 26, 2026.
- ^ "Structure of staphylococcal alpha-hemolysin, a heptameric transmembrane pore". Science 274 (5294): 1859-1866. 1996. doi:10.1126/science.274.5294.1859.
- ^ "The structure of a mycobacterial outer-membrane channel". Science 303 (5661): 1189-1192. 2004. doi:10.1126/science.1094114.