Weill Cornell Medicine has announced a three-year, $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to fund development of a next-generation high-speed atomic-force microscope (AFM) capable of capturing the dynamics of proteins in unprecedented detail.

The project will be led by Simon Scheuring, a professor of physiology and biophysics in anesthesiology at Weill Cornell and director of the school’s Scheuring Bio-AFM-Lab. Participants in the project will include researchers and scientists from Weill Cornell as well as collaborators from Rockefeller University, the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Key to understanding the structure of proteins—a step essential to the development of advanced drugs and medical therapies—is the speed at which proteins change shape (a process known as conformation). Standard electron microscopy employs averaging technologies to create images at the atomic or near-atomic level and is effectively unable to capture protein conformation. AFM uses technologies that scan and in effect “feel” the surface of molecules to create a detailed image. While current AFM technology allows for imaging at the millisecond range, the next generation of high-speed AFM would revolutionize biomedical imaging, enabling the observation of protein conformation with a sub-millisecond temporal resolution.

“Our aim is to improve the speed of AFM ‘movies’ by two orders of magnitude over current commercial technology,” said Simon Scheuring. “This will allow us to record protein dynamics that cannot be seen with current technology but can be crucial to understanding how these proteins work and how to target them with drugs.”

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