Imaging proteins in membranes of living cells by high-resolution scanning ion conductance microscopy.

Advances in imaging and microscopy have driven many discoveries in biology over the past century. Electron-microscopy-based techniques (for example, freeze-fracture, freezeetching, and/or immunogold labeling) have provided a wealth of evidence that cell plasma membranes are organized into structural and functional microdomains. However, these techniques are only applicable to fixed or frozen cells, thereby precluding live imaging of functionally important membrane structures in living cells. Lower-resolution optical methods such as fluorescent-molecule video imaging and single-particle tracking of gold-conjugated ligands have been used successfully to follow the dynamics of specific molecules in the plasma membrane of living cells. The disadvantage of these tracking methods is that they require labeling and hence do not image the relative position of the