The sensitivity analysis of atomic force microscope (AFM) based manipulation of gold spherical nanoparticles in air medium has been carried out in previous research works. In the AFM-based manipulations conducted in various biological liquid mediums, the new environmental parameters associated with these biological fluids also affect the dynamics of the manipulation process. Therefore in this r...

Founded in June 2006, AFM BioMed organized its first international conference from 19 to 21 April 2007 in Barcelona (Pellequer et al., 2007). Hosted by Universitat de Barcelona, IBEC and the CEA, this event welcomed approximately 220 scientists from 24 countries reflecting the strong and rapidly growing enthusiasm for the use of AFM in the life sciences and medicine (Parot et al., 2007). The se...

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is capable of solid surface characterization at the microscopic and submicroscopic scales. It can also be used for the determination of surface tension of solids (gamma) from pull-off force (F) measurements, followed by analysis of the measured F values using contact mechanics theoretical models. Although a majority of the literature gamma results was obtained usin...

This chapter outlines procedures for sample preparation and the determination of nanoparticle size using atomic force microscopy (AFM). Several procedures for dispersing gold nanoparticles on various surfaces such that they are suitable for imaging and height measurement via intermittent contact mode, or tapping mode, AFM are first described. The methods for AFM calibration and operation to mak...

We have developed a wideband digital frequency detector for high-speed frequency modulation atomic force microscopy (FM-AFM). We used a subtraction-based phase comparator (PC) in a phase-locked loop circuit instead of a commonly used multiplication-based PC, which has enhanced the detection bandwidth to 100 kHz. The quantitative analysis of the noise performance revealed that the internal noise...

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is becoming an increasingly important tool-of-thetrade in the life sciences. In the study of morphology and dynamics of cells it has the particular merit of being able to interact non-destructively with live cells in vitro. Thus it occupies a unique niche in the suite of techniques that has so far been dominated by the photonand electron-optical microscopies and sp...

A new micro-XRF instrument was developed in combination with an atomic force microscope (AFM). A small pinhole of 5 or 10 μm was made on the AFM cantilever. The center of the micro X-ray beam generated by a polycapillary X-ray lens was passed through the pinhole. The present experiment demonstrated that the size of the original X-ray beam of 48 μm produced by the polycapillary lens was reduced ...

We review the use of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM) and force spectroscopy (FS) for probing the ultrastructure, chemistry, physical characteristics and motion of fungal cells. When first developed, SEM was used to image fixed/dehydrated/gold coated specimens, but here we describe more recent SEM developments as they apply to fungal cells. CryoSEM offers high r...