Light and electron microscopy each have their distinct limitations – with light it becomes increasingly difficult to resolve smaller and smaller features while electron microscopy can resolve small structures but its samples must be meticulously prepared which will kill any live specimens.
And then there is atomic force microscopy (AFM) which is a technique originally developed to assess the physical and mechanical properties of materials at extremely high resolutions. Here imaging speeds are not fast enough – several minutes per frame –to capture relevant data for living biological samples. By contrast, a further method, high-speed AFM (HS-AFM), is far faster but cannot measure mechanical properties.
Understanding the potential of this type of microscopy for the analysis of large…