Atomic Force Microscopy Reveals Nanoscopic Raft Dynamics on Cell Membranes: From Hypothesis to Visualization
A collaborative research team of four professors and several graduate students, including Prof. Richard P. Cheng, Prof. Ja-an Annie Ho, Prof. Chun-hsien Chen of the Departments of Chemistry and Biochemical Science and Technology at National Taiwan University, and Prof. Li-Chen Wu of the Department of Applied Chemistry at National Chi Nan University, has made a long-sought breakthrough. By combining atomic force microscopy (AFM) with a Hadamard product–based image reconstruction algorithm, the researchers successfully achieved visualization, for the first time, of the nanoscopic dynamics of membrane rafts in live cells, making visible these subtle dynamics that had long remained invisible on the cell membrane.