Heteropolymer translocation through nanopores

Abstract

We investigate the translocation dynamics of heteropolymers driven through a nanopore using a constant temperature Langevin thermostat. Specifically, we consider heteropolymers consisting of two types of monomers labeled A and B, which are distinguished by the magnitude of the driving force that they experience inside the pore. From a series of studies on polymers with sequences AnBn+m we identify both universal as well as sequence specific properties of the translocating chains. We find that the scaling of the average translocation time as a function of the chain length N remains unaffected by the heterogeneity, while the residence time of each bead is a strong function of the sequence for short repeat units. We further discover that for a symmetric heteropolymer AnBn of fixed length, the pattern exhibited by the residence time of the individual monomer has striking similarity with an interference pattern for an optical grating with N/(2n) slits. These results are relevant for designing nanopore based sequencing techniques.