[MURG] Atomic Microscopes Get Compound Vision

[Joseph J. Strout]

At 12:47 PM -0500 8/27/04, neurohacker wrote:

>Atomic Microscopes Get Compound Vision
>http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?articleID=2004-04-05-1

No, this l ink is to " MRI Watches Blood Flow".  I think the link you meant is:
<http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?articleID=2004-08-18-4>

I agree this is an important development, but not as directly 
relevant as the first paragraph or two would make it sound.  Note how 
it works: they attach an antibody to the AFM tip, and then they can 
tell when it's trying to bind to a protein.  That means that that a 
given scan only detects one particular type of protein (or, more 
realistically, one protein plus other proteins that antibody happens 
to bind to -- no one antibody is completely specific).

So, this method is not producing a complete chemical map of the 
sample.  Something like ablative spectroscopy might turn out to be 
more useful in the end.

On the other hand, if it turns out that in addition to morphology, we 
need to know the distributions of just one or two proteins, then this 
could be a reasonable approach.

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