Analyte sensing across membranes with artificial pores

This review covers synthetic pores as sensors, an interdisciplinary topic that may appeal not only to bioorganic and supramolecular but also to analytical, organic, or physical chemists. In the introduction, fundamental concepts and methods are briefly reiterated. The next section introduces synthetic pores as multifunctional supramolecules that are created from abiotic scaffolds and act in lipid bilayer membranes. Then follows the introduction of the concept of synthetic multifunctional pores as general optical transducers of chemical reactions. For this purpose, synthetic pores that recognize small changes in bulk and/or charge of as many substrates and products as possible are best, and internal pi-clamps are added to catch elusive analytes. For multicomponent sensing in complex matrixes, synthetic pores as general transducers are combined with enzymes as specific signal generators. Realized examples of practical applications to samples from the supermarket describe synthetic pores as sensors of sugar in soft drinks. Section 3 focuses on sensing with biological and bioengineered pores. Selected topics, such as general electrical transduction in planar and supported lipid bilayer membranes, the concept of stochastic sensing of single analytes, immunosensing, covalent polynucleotide amplifiers, and single gene sequencing, are briefly spotlighted to also outline future perspectives with synthetic pore sensors. Section 4 briefly covers initial breakthroughs on sensing with synthetic pores in membranes other than lipid bilayers, such as functionalized conical gold and cylindrical carbon nanotubes.