Kodera Noriyuki, Kinoshita Tatsuya, Ito Takahiro, Ando Toshio
Department of Physics, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa 920-1192, Japan.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2003;538:119-27. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4419-9029-7_11.
The atomic force microscope (AFM) is a powerful tool for imaging biological molecules on a substrate, in solution. However, there is no effective time axis with AFM; commercially available AFMs require minutes to capture an image, but many interesting biological processes occur at much higher rate. Hence, what we can observe using the AFM is limited to stationary molecules, or those moving very slowly. We sought to increase markedly the scan speed of the AFM, so that in the future it can be used to study the dynamic behaviour of biomolecules. For this purpose, we have developed various devices optimised for high-speed scanning. Combining these devices has produced an AFM that can capture a 100 x 100 pixel image within 80 ms, thus generating a movie consisting of many successive images of a sample in aqueous solution. This is demonstrated by imaging myosin V molecules moving on mica, in solution.
原子力显微镜（AFM）是一种用于在底物上、溶液中对生物分子进行成像的强大工具。然而，AFM没有有效的时间轴；市售的AFM需要数分钟才能捕获一幅图像，但许多有趣的生物过程发生速率要高得多。因此，我们使用AFM所能观察到的仅限于静止分子或移动非常缓慢的分子。我们试图显著提高AFM的扫描速度，以便未来能够用于研究生物分子的动态行为。为此，我们开发了各种针对高速扫描进行优化的设备。将这些设备组合起来产生了一种AFM，它能够在80毫秒内捕获一幅100×100像素的图像，从而生成由水溶液中样品的许多连续图像组成的电影。这通过对溶液中在云母上移动的肌球蛋白V分子进行成像得到了证明。
