Nano-imaging and its applications to biomedicine

Abstract

Nanotechnology tools, such as Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), are now becoming widely used in life sciences and biomedicine. AFM is a versatile technique that allows studying at the nanoscale the morphological, dynamic, and mechanical properties of biological samples, such as living cells, biomolecules, and tissues in their native state under physiological conditions. In this article, an overview of the principles of AFM will be first presented and this will be followed by discussion of some of our own recent work on the applications of AFM imaging to biomedicine. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.