Quantifying electro-osmotic flow in mutant MspA nanopores

Escape-rate measurements of a 30–amino acid dipolar peptide in MspA nanopores show electro-osmotic flow work of ~5.6–16.7 kBT at 80 mV, varying by mutant.

• Why it matters: Mixed-charge analytes can be difficult to drive purely by electrophoresis, and there has been no direct experimental way to quantify electro-osmotic flow in nanopores.
• What they did: The peptide was trapped in MspA, and its escape rate versus voltage was used to extract EOF work across wildtype and mutant MspA, benchmarked against a M2-MspA reference. Finite-element simulations were used to confirm the experimental trends.
• The result: Mutations with charges near the nanopore constriction produced the highest EOF, enabling a quantitative metric for studying EOF in future nanopore sequencing and sensing.

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