Investigation of polystyrene nanoparticles and DNA-protein complexes by AFM with image reconstruction

The problems of tip-sample interactions are considered in atomic force microscope (AFM) images of comparatively simple polystyrene particles and thermally denatured DNA-protein complexes with the application of the blind reconstruction method. In the case of soft particles, we found a considerable reduction of the vertical dimension of the AFM image. In addition, we applied the same image reconstruction method on thermal denatured DNA HindIII and DNase I complexes to characterize the unusual appearance of the AFM image. In the process of image reconstruction, each tip geometry was extracted from the same original image with the reconstructed image. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.