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.
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