Electronic BioSciences

Electronic BioSciences (EBS) is a company in San Diego, California, that makes low-noise electronics and membranes for measuring single ion channels and nanopores. Its homepage describes it as "Precision Electronics for Life Sciences", with applications in DNA sequencing, ion channel characterization and chemical sensing, and its first commercial product, the Nanopatch, launched in 2013.^[1][2] Its research has been supported by federal grants, and the National Institutes of Health database lists 73 projects awarded to the company.^[3] One of the authors of the 2008 review "The potential and challenges of nanopore sequencing" gave Electronic BioSciences, San Diego, as his affiliation.^[4]

The membrane at the center of the Nanopatch has its roots in the laboratory of Henry White at the University of Utah. A 2007 paper from that laboratory recorded single protein ion channels in a lipid bilayer stretched across one nanopore in glass.^[5] A patent on the arrangement, filed in 2010 with a priority date of May 5, 2006 and granted on November 12, 2013, is assigned to the University of Utah Research Foundation. In its worked example a pore of 150 nanometers radius has an open-pore resistance of 1.26 megohms, and the bilayer seals across it at 88 gigohms.^[6]

The first of EBS's own Small Business Innovation Research proposals for the device, in 2007, describes a glass nanopore system "previously developed under a DARPA project". The pore is 10 to 75 nanometers in radius, set in a glass surface a millimeter across and covered by a lipid bilayer. The aim was to match the low noise of a patch clamp, the standard tool for recording from an ion channel, while using a planar bilayer that is easier to build and to automate.^[7] The Phase II grant of 2011 planned four prototype systems.^[8]

The company's DNA work started from the protein pore alpha-hemolysin. A 2007 application proposed to read single bases by the blockade of ionic current, with the key change that the force driving the ionic current would be separate from the force driving the DNA through the pore. The application named White's group as "the inventors of the new suspended membrane configuration" and listed David Deamer as a collaborator. It added that, in theory, the system could sequence a mammalian genome of 3 billion bases in under an hour, a thousandfold improvement on the systems then in use.^[9]

By 2009 the target was stated in the title of the next award, "99.99% Accuracy Direct DNA Sequencing via the Protein Nanopore Method". Its summary identified the main obstacle as random variation in the order in which bases pass through the pore, which it split into three sources of error to be reduced separately.^[10] A grant of 2016 turned to exonuclease sequencing, in which an enzyme clips bases from a strand one at a time and a pore reads each free nucleotide. The stated limit was capture: a pore had to catch every released nucleotide to read it with 100 percent accuracy.^[11]

The most recent awards are about re-reading. A 2024 project was to move single RNA molecules back and forth through a nanopore so that each could be read repeatedly and a consensus built from the passes.^[12] A project of 2026, "Enabling Protein Sequencing Through Friction-Mediated Nanopore Transport", extends the aim to proteins.^[13]

• Biological nanopore
• Daniel Branton
• List of nanopore companies
• Nanopore protein sequencing