5th May 2017

Oxford Instruments Asylum Research and Microscopy and Analysis Present the Webinar: “Video-Rate Atomic Force Microscopy Enables New Research Opportunities”

Oxford Instruments Asylum Research in conjunction with Microscopy and Analysis will present the webinar “Video-Rate Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) Enables New Research Opportunities” on June 7, 2017, 8:00 am PDT. Dr. Mario Viani, Director of R&D at Asylum Research, will present new results for scientists interested in exploring video-rate AFM for characterizing biochemical reactions, self–assembly, crystal growth, and other future research opportunities. View the webinar at Webinar: “Video-Rate AFM Enables New Research Opportunities”

This webinar introduces the capabilities of a new video-rate AFM that enables imaging at speeds 300X faster than conventional AFMs and even an order of magnitude faster than current “fast scanning” AFMs. The ability to capture movies with temporal resolution better than 100 milliseconds opens a wide range of dynamic processes to investigation with AFM. Preliminary results including the real-time self-assembly of collagen into fibrils, the enzymatic cleaving of DNA, and the migration of surfactant micelles on graphite will be presented. Additionally, related experiments such as the melting and re-crystallization of polymers will be shown and future research opportunities that might be enabled by this technology will be discussed. Finally, we will briefly review the design of the AFM used for this work, the newly released Asylum Research Cypher VRS, the first and only full-featured video-rate AFM.

 “We live in exciting times for AFM,” said Dr. Viani. “Never before has there been a video-rate AFM that is full-featured, high-resolution, and easy-to-use. Any scientists seeking a solution to study dynamic processes at the nanoscale should join us for the webinar. We have only just scratched the surface of the vast potential of the new Cypher VRS AFM. It’s not often that a new technology suddenly creates so many new research opportunities. I’m looking forward to seeing what our first users discover.”

Figure above:  Cypher Video-Rate AFM with frames from a movie of lambda digest DNA cleaved by DNAse1 enzyme. Imaged at a line rate of 625 Hz at 320×64 pixels for a frame rate of 8.7 fps with the Asylum Research Cypher VRS Video-Rate AFM.