LAUSR

The ability to precisely move the nanopipette and to measure simultaneously an ion current allows an unprecedented level of nanoscale imaging of living cells – scanning ion conductance microscopy (SICM)(Korchev et al., 1997). The speed of data acquisition increased by hopping protocol of scanning (Novak et al., 2009) positions this as a technology which may be suited to relatively high-speed scanning of cell membrane during various biological processes in real time. SICM imaging is not limited to topographical studies but also for functional properties studying in combination with other techniques such as confocal and fluorescence microscopy (Novak et al., 2014), electrochemical measurements (Erofeev et al., 2018), chemical mapping (Zhang et al., 2019) and patch-clamp recording (Novak et al., 2013). This has the potential to open new horizons in medicine and biology and could be of particular value to the pharmaceutical industry.