Community news: The 2020 Nanopore Weekly Meeting: A Monday virtual event for nanopore electrochemistry

Abstract

The year of 2020 has brought many challenges-and some opportunities-for researchers. Especially regarding the many in-person scientific meetings that had been planned for that year and beyond, conference organizers around the world were faced with many decisions related to attendance, alternative timings, and new online formats and platforms. This led to numerous creative adjustments, many of which needed to be set up on an urgent timescale or followed from the experience of bringing an in-person into an online setting. A special arrangement is described below which not only brings researchers together for scientific dialogue but, owing in part to its weekly frequency and promotion on social media, has served as a form of intense community building around a topic of current international interest. The ever-growing need to characterize single molecules remains one of the central challenges in life science for biomedical diagnostic and personalized medicine. [1-5] Nanopores are nanoscale-sized channels that can provide a confined space as a sensing interface for detecting single molecules with high spatial and temporal resolution. [6,7] Nanopore technology has been a proven success for DNA sequencing and is making its first strides toward protein sequencing. [8-12] Aiming to discuss challenges, opportunities, and applications for the nanopore field and encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration, [13-16] the 2020 Nanopore Weekly Meeting took place online every Monday starting from October 19, 2020 as a continuing international event after the 2020 Nanopore Electrochemistry Meeting, which was transformed to an online event in the past October due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 Nanopore Weekly Meeting was chaired by Professor Mathias Winterhalter from Jacobs University (Germany), Professor Meni Wanunu from Northeastern University (USA) and Professor Yi-Tao Long from Nanjing University (China) (Figure 1). One or two oral presentations were provided around 14:00 Central European Time (CET) every Monday to allow the most accessibility for different time zones around the world. From October 19, 2020 until February 1, 2021, 24 presentations have attracted ∼100 regular participants each week from different countries and areas in Asia, America, Europe, etc. The committee said This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.