Our new AFM arrived and is finally up and running!
This summer is bringing a lot of news! Besides our recent publications with collaboration partners, conferences and Sarah joining our lab, we finally also got our new Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) installed!!!! Such big purchases always take a lot of time. First, we need the money – the search for the funding alone took 1 year. In this case, the instrument was funded thanks to generous contributions from the faculty of Medicine, the government, and the region (ALF) as well as the Kempe foundation. As this instrument will be available to all researchers at the university and integrated in the Biochemical Imaging Centre Umea (BICU) we then needed to define precise requirements for current and potential future users. And then, comes the long purchasing process, including discussions with potential providers and procurement process. The order was finally placed (in December 2021) all that was left to do was … waiting.
In May, the new AFM finally arrived but with it came some problems: The new instrument is quite big and needs a lot of space with few disturbances, as it is so sensitive. Once the place was decided we realized, that the biggest box did not fit through our doors. So it happened that the new AFM ended up in the dungeons of the hospital for the first months. In July, it was finally time to assemble everything with the help of an expert from Bruker. The piece that wouldn’t fit through our doors could luckily be dismantled and put together again at its final destination – next to our TIRF microscope. When all parts got assembled the moment came to finally set the AFM alive. The following two days Fouzia, Sarah and Konrad, our AFM-experts, got hand-on-training for this new instrument.
And here comes the nerd-section: We got a JPK XP4 from Bruker. It can easily be combined with our TIRF microscope, it offers us single-molecule force spectroscopy with the freedom of adjusting the parameters. It is equipped with a moveable stage, and we have a range of cantilevers from 0.03 N/m to 40 N/m. The delicate parts of this sensitive instrument are placed in an acoustic enclosure to minimize noise and disturbances from other sources (like people walking by). We also have an on-stage incubator to perform experiments on live cells. As it is now located in a BSL-2 environment, we are now able to investigate unmodified viruses. Previously we needed to inactivate them before using the other AFMs on campus in BLS-1 settings.
Now, we are very excited thinking of all the scientific experiments we will be able to perform in our lab and have already many plans. We will use it to look at the binding strength between single viruses, immobilized on the AFM tip, and biomimetic or live cell surfaces. We would further like to characterize the mechanical properties of cells after virus infection or to image the arrangement of proteins bound to cell surface mimics, just to name a few examples.
The microscope will soon be available to all interested users at the University. We also hope that we can extend our collaborations with local groups. And most importantly, we hope that the AFM will behave nicely after giving us such a tricky time for the installation and that it will run smoothly for all our experiments. Exciting times are ahead!