Using nanotechniques to explore microbial surfaces

Our current understanding of microbial surfaces owes much to the development of electron microscopy techniques. Yet, a crucial limitation of electron microscopy is that it cannot be used to examine biological structures directly in aqueous solutions. In recent years, however, atomic force microscopy (AFM) has provided a range of new opportunities for viewing and manipulating microbial surfaces in their native environments. Examples of AFM-based analyses include visualizing conformational changes in single membrane proteins, the real-time observation of cell-surface dynamics, analysing the unfolding of cell-surface proteins and detecting individual cell-surface receptors. These analyses have contributed to our understanding of the structure - function relationships of cell surfaces and will hopefully allow new applications to be developed for AFM in medicine and biotechnology.