Manipulation and Isolation of Individual DNA Molecules with Atomic Force Microscope - DNA Nanotechnology: From Structure to Function - page 82

enzyme-digestion chemistry is well known, the information of the broken bonds
on the DNA molecule is clear, which affords further possibility for single-molecule
reaction at the broken ends.
DNase I is known as a type of enzyme that digests DNA in a nonspecific
manner, e.g., DNA digestion is conducted in random positions disregarding the
DNA sequence. However, the result shown in Fig. 5.6 clearly indicated that DNA
digestion by DNase I was limited only at the positions that DNase I was deposited.

5.5 Future Perspective

In summary, we have shown several straightforward demonstrations which indicate
AFM is indeed a useful tool for manipulating and isolating individual biomolecules
at the nanometer scale. These examples directly show that not only can AFM be used
to “see” the biomolecules in a high resolution, but can also be used to dominate
an ongoing bio-process. There is no doubt that new applications will continue to
be developed to further expand our repertoire of AFM-based nanomanipulation
techniques.
As mentioned above, the throughput to manipulate biomolecules should be
largely improved. Our future works would focus on developing automatic and
intelligentized nanomanipulation systems. To this end [ 25 ], a prototype of automatic
“molecular surgery” system has been produced, in which the thermal drift is
automatically compensated and the AFM tip movement is well controlled during
DNA nanomanipulation. With this “molecular surgery” system, the efficiency for
isolating individual DNA fragment with AFM tips has been increased for an order
of magnitude compared to that operated manually.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China
(No. 10,975,175 and 90,923,002) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. KJCX2-EW-N03).
Y. Zhang thanks the Max Planck Society for support of a partner group.

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