Nanopores have recently emerged as a label free platform for interrogating sequence and structure in nucleic acids. Data are typically reported as a time series of ionic current as DNA sequence is determined when an applied electric field is applied across a single pore controlled by a voltage-clamped amplifier. Hundreds to thousands of molecules can be examined at high bandwidth and spatial resolution.
A crucial obstacle to the success of nanopores as a reliable DNA analysis tool is the processivity, which affects average read length. This and other desirable properties can be enhanced by modifying polymerases to increase the amount of sequence information obtained from a sequencing reaction.