Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The University of Washington received a $1.62 million Project Grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) under the Biomedical Research and Research Training program (CFDA 93.859) to develop and commercialize nanopore tweezers (NT), an ultra-precision single-molecule technique for studying enzyme motion along nucleic acids. The award, which runs from August 1, 2026 through July 31, 2030, funds critical technology advancement and standardization efforts to enable broader adoption of NT by the scientific and industrial communities. Key deliverables include precision calibration of applied force, development of open-source parallelized NT hardware, improvements to the ion current sensor, and establishment of NT assays for various nucleic-acid-processing enzymes.

The nanopore tweezers technology represents a transformative advancement over existing single-molecule techniques, utilizing electronic measurements of ion currents through a protein nanopore sensor to track enzyme motion with sub-nucleotide precision and sub-millisecond temporal resolution while simultaneously identifying nucleotide sequences. This award specifically focuses on reducing technical complexity and implementation barriers so that laboratories without direct involvement from the University of Washington's research group can independently adopt and deploy the technology for studying enzyme kinetics and sequence-specific interactions at biological scales previously inaccessible with conventional methods.