Visualization of Protein Dynamics using High-Speed Atomic Force Microscopy and Image Analysis

Abstract

Recent progress of high-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) has enabled us to visualize dynamic conformational change and molecular interaction of proteins in realtime under a physiological condition. Molecular mechanisms through dynamic phenomena that have been deduced from the accumulation of experimental evidence by various analytical techniques are now able to be directly and intuitively understood from AFM movies. While a movie provides a great deal of information compared to a static image, extracting useful information based on objective criteria is essential for the next step. This review describes representative HS-AFM data for three typical dynamic biological phenomena; conformational dynamics of single proteins, linear movement of enzymes and velocity analysis and dynamic molecular interaction together with imaging processing techniques for interpreting AFM data and efficient analysis of successive images.