Potential biomedical applications of the scanned nanopipette.

One grand challenge in current biology is to understand how individual cellular molecules interact together to form a functioning living cell. This requires new methods to image a live cell on the nanoscale. The scanned nanopipette can be used to obtain high resolution noncontact images of the surface of live cells under physiological conditions and has been used to develop a family of related methods that allow mapping of cell function on the nanoscale, and hence allow the relationship between cell structure and function to be probed. This is a powerful method to bridge the current gap between high resolution structures of individual molecular complexes and low resolution imaging of live cell structure and function.