High-speed Atomic Force Microscopy for Bio-imaging Application

Abstract

Structural biology has long been contributing to our understanding of how proteins function by providing their detailed structures. However, the revealed structures have been restricted to static snapshots, limiting the level of our understanding. This restriction is now removed by high-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) that allows direct visualization of individual protein molecules in action at sub-molecular resolution under near physiological conditions. HS-AFM studies performed in the last few years have provided new mechanistic insight into the functional mechanism of proteins. In this review, I would like to introduce our recent HS-AFM studies on proteins, including membrane proteins embedded in lipids and a DNA endonuclease. In addition, we demonstrated that developed HS-AFM for live mammalian cells is possible to image morphological changes of living hippocampal neurons.