Aerolysin, a Powerful Protein Sensor for Fundamental Studies and Development of Upcoming Applications

Nanopore electrical approach is a breakthrough in single molecular level detection of particles as small as ions, and complex as biomolecules. This technique can be used for molecule analysis, and characterization as well as for the understanding of confined medium dynamics in chemical or biological reactions. Altogether, the information obtained from these kinds of experiments will allow to address challenges in a variety of biological fields. The sensing, design and manufacture of nanopores is crucial to obtain these objectives. For some time now, aerolysin, a pore forming toxin, and its mutants have shown high potential in real time analytical chemistry, size discrimination of neutral polymers, oligosaccharides, oligonucleotides and peptides at monomeric resolution, sequence identification, chemical modification on DNA, potential biomarkers detection and protein folding analysis. This review focuses, on the results obtained with aerolysin nanopores on the fields of chemistry, biology, physics and biotechnology. We discuss and compare as well the results obtained with other protein channel sensors.