Atomic Force Microscopy Functional Imaging on Vascular Endothelial Cells

One of the challenging tasks in molecular cell biology is to identify and localize specific binding sites on biological samples with high spatial accuracy (in order of several nm). During the past 5 years, simultaneous topography and recognition imaging (TREC) has become a powerful AFM-based technique for quick and easy high-resolution receptor mapping. In this chapter, we provide a flavor of TREC application on vascular endothelial cells by describing the detailed procedures for all stages of the experiment from tip and sample preparations through the operating principles and visualization.