DNA–protein interactions are at the core of the cellular machinery and single molecule methods have revolutionized the possibilities to study, and our understanding of these interactions on the molecular level. Nanofluidic channels have been extensively used for studying single DNA molecules during the last twelve years and in this review, we discuss how this experimental platform has been extended to studies of DNA–protein interactions. We first present how the design of the device can be tailored for the specific DNA–protein system studied and how the channels can be passivated to avoid non-specific binding of proteins. We then focus on describing the different kinds of DNA-interacting proteins that have been studied in nanofluidic devices, including proteins that compact DNA and proteins that form filaments on DNA. Our main objective is to highlight the diverse functionalities of DNA–protein systems that have been characterized using nanofluidic structures and hence demonstrate the versatility of these experimental tools. We finally discuss potential future directions studies of DNA–protein complexes in nanochannels might take, including specific DNA–protein systems that are difficult to analyze with traditional techniques, devices with increased complexity, and fully integrated lab-on-a-chip devices for analysis of material extracted from (single) cells.

中文翻译：

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使用纳米流体工具探索单个DNA分子水平上的DNA-蛋白质相互作用

DNA-蛋白质相互作用是细胞机制的核心，单分子方法彻底改变了研究的可能性，以及我们在分子水平上对这些相互作用的理解。在过去的十二年中，纳米流体通道已广泛用于研究单个DNA分子，在本综述中，我们讨论了该实验平台如何扩展到DNA-蛋白质相互作用的研究。我们首先介绍如何针对所研究的特定DNA-蛋白质系统量身定制设备的设计，以及如何钝化通道以避免蛋白质的非特异性结合。然后，我们着重于描述已在纳米流体设备中研究过的各种类型的与DNA相互作用的蛋白质，包括使DNA紧缩的蛋白质和在DNA上形成细丝的蛋白质。我们的主要目标是强调利用纳米流体结构表征的DNA-蛋白质系统的各种功能，从而证明这些实验工具的多功能性。我们最后讨论了纳米通道中的DNA-蛋白质复合物可能采取的未来未来研究方向，包括传统技术难以分析的特定DNA-蛋白质系统，复杂性不断提高的设备以及完全集成的芯片实验室用于分析的设备从（单个）细胞中提取的材料。