Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Manipulation and Isolation of Individual DNA
Molecules with Atomic Force Microscope
Yi Zhang and Jun Hu
Abstract Isolation and analysis of single DNA fragment are of great importance
for both fundamental research and future biomedical applications. In this chapter,
we introduce a technique based on atomic force microscope (AFM) to manipulate
and isolate individual DNA molecules at the nanometer scale. The AFM was used
to site specifically cut, push, and pick up single DNA fragments from solid surfaces.
Subsequent amplification of the isolated single DNA fragments indicates that the
DNA molecules keep their bioactivity after AFM manipulation. We believe that
new applications will continue to be developed to further expand our repertoire of
the AFM-based nanomanipulation techniques.
Keywords DNA • Atomic force microscope (AFM) • Isolation • Nanomanipu-
lation • Single molecule
5.1
Introduction
In the community of biotechnology, it is gradually reaching a consensus that the
analysis of single biomolecules is of critical importance in fundamental genetic
research, clinical diagnosis, and biotechnological development and application in
industry [ 1 , 2 ]. Therefore, it is usually required to isolate single bio-species from a
mixture of biomaterials for further analysis. Recently, isolation of single bio-species
has been achieved down to the single-molecule level due to the great progresses in
a number of techniques [ 3 - 5 ].
Among these technologies, atomic force microscopy (AFM) [ 6 ] has the unique
advantages in isolation of single biomolecules. First of all, AFM is a high-resolution
Y. Z h a n g ( )•J.Hu
Division of Physical Biology, Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, China
e-mail: zhangyi@sinap.ac.cn ; hujun@sinap.ac.cn
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