29 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

High-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) is a powerful technique that provides dynamic movies of biomolecules at work. First, I will briefly review our recent developments to break temporal limitations to characterize molecular dynamics by developing HS-AFM line scanning (HS-AFM-LS) and HS-AFM height spectroscopy (HS-AFM-HS) [1], and resolution limitations by developing Localization AFM (LAFM) [2]. Then, I will detail how we used HS-AFM to analyze membrane-embedded Piezo1 [3] and TRPV3 [4] sensory ion channels at the single-molecule level, and discovered a previously unobserved, transient and reversible pentameric state in TRPV3 [4].

 

References:

[1] Heath et al., Nature Communications, 2018, 9(1):4983, High-Speed AFM Height Spectroscopy (HS-AFM-HS): Microsecond dynamics of unlabeled biomolecules.

[2] Heath et al., Nature, 2021, 594(7863):385–390, doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03551-x, Localization Atomic Force Microscopy.

[3] Lin et al., Nature, 2019, 573(7773):230–234, doi.10.1038/s41586-019-1499-2, Force-induced conformational changes in Piezo1.

[4] Lansky et al., Nature, 2023, 621(7977), 206–214, doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06470-1, A pentameric TRPV3 channel with a dilated pore.

  • Sanket Walujkar

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