Molecular Aquarium
The Molecular Aquarium is an experimental platform that demonpore, inc., now Molecular Reality Corporation, began in January 2020 to test sliding occlusion on many pores at once. Each 2 by 2 centimeter silicon die carries arrays of small pores, and a selector plate above them slides "like a vernier caliper", so that only one pair of pores lines up at a time. A harmonic gear drive moves the plate.[1] The company started the project as a response to COVID-19, an effort it called the CoronaPore project, and had pore arrays for it made at a microfabrication company that year.[2][3] The arrays have not yet been tested, and in 2026 they were "sitting on Kemmishtree's desk, as museum pieces".[1]
Origins
"We saw covid coming (pretty much every friend I have in biotech did and launched some kind of project), and it was obvious that solid-state nanopores could make a difference," Kent Kemmish wrote in 2026 of January 2020. "We tried to launch the Molecular Aquarium (described elsewhere) because of covid."[2] He credited a 2018 study from Osaka for the confidence to try. Its authors had passed single virus particles of different serotypes of the same virus through a solid-state pore and trained what he called "a very simple (primitive by modern ML standards) machine learning model" to tell them apart, although, as he put it, "the serotypes are all roughly the same size and shape".[2][4] Members who helped the effort were later given a badge in Epic Quest Bio whose text reads: "You tried to help us build the molecular aquarium early on in the pandemic."[1]
Design
A juxtapore forms where two holes in two stacked membranes overlap. Sliding one membrane changes the overlap and with it the size of the opening. One pair of holes tests one geometry at a time. The aquarium was meant to test many: the company's 2026 description of its arrays says they "were designed with the goal of testing thousands of precise occlusion geometries quickly in a single setup", with pores "precisely spaced so that the micropores would pass over each other at precise angles and positions, with slight variations in the size of each pore".[3]
The arrangement borrows the principle of the vernier scale, which Pierre Vernier described in 1631. On a caliper, ten divisions of the sliding scale span nine of the fixed scale, so only one pair of marks lines up at a time, and sliding the vernier by a tenth of a division moves the coincidence to the next pair. Arrays of holes whose spacings differ slightly behave the same way. At any position one hole in the top plate sits over its partner below while the others are covered, and a short slide closes that pair and opens the next. In the company's words, an array "was designed to slide across another array of dozens of pores, while only allowing a single juxtaposition to be open at the same time".[3] Company records put the count at "dozens to hundreds of pores per die" and describe "computed sliding occlusion sweeps with nanometer sensitivity, minimal backlash, and correlative electrical readout".[1]
The drive is a strain-wave or harmonic gear, invented in the 1950s by C. Walton Musser, in which an elliptical cam flexes a thin toothed ring inside a rigid ring with a few more teeth. Each turn of the cam advances the flexible ring by only the difference in teeth, which gives a large reduction with almost no backlash. A caption on the company's site explains the choice: "You can get pretty far with piezos", but for "a large number of mechanical nanopores all moving in concert, with zero backlash and infinite range, this is a really cool way to do it."[1]
Fabrication
The arrays were made in 2020 with a Silicon Valley microfabrication company, by what the company calls "a modified DRIE process".[3] Deep reactive-ion etching cuts narrow vertical holes in silicon by alternating short bursts of etching with steps that coat the walls, a method developed at Robert Bosch GmbH in the 1990s. The pores in the arrays photographed in 2026 were "all under 10 microns", with "the potential to form juxtaposed true nanopores with their specific array partners", and a caption on the company's site describes the top plate as "an array of arrays of 1-50 micron micropores".[3][1]
In a 2026 post, the company's Quartermaster persona described a photograph of one array taken "with my iPhone through the eyepiece (we didn't have a camera adapter at the time)". Light from below turned the image red where it passed through "a membrane single-digit-microns thick".[3] A video on the company's channel is titled "molecular aquarium silicon".[5]
Status
The Quartermaster's post ends: "Kemmishtree has a bunch of arrays like this sitting on his table. They're ready to go when the Corps has the resources to test them."[3] It adds that the company still has "a lot of these pores available for potential incorporation into MR devices including the demonpore 64 and the Molecular Aquarium", and that "because the actual microfabrication gave beautiful results, we'll make more with the same process in future."[3] The website caption on the arrays promises new silicon "when we try again to build the aquarium".[1] Of the consumer version, Kemmish wrote in 2026: "I don't think we'll have 'molecular aquariums' for sale this decade at your local neighborhood Target store."[6]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ a b c Kemmishtree (March 29, 2026). "(no subject)". EQBio-OS.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Quartermaster (March 29, 2026). "The Line". EQBio-OS.
- ^ Arima, A. (2018). "Selective detections of single-viruses using solid-state nanopores". Scientific Reports 8: 16305. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-34665-4.
- ^ molecular aquarium silicon (Video). EpicQuestBio.
- ^ Kemmishtree (March 28, 2026). "2022 sci-tech overview". EQBio-OS.