ABSTRACT
Life is possible thanks to the perfect harmony of thousands of different molecules, proteins, cells, tissues, etc., working in a precise and coordinated way and allowing us to perform all our everyday activities. In order for this huge ensemble of biological structures to continue working without problems, each biological component requires specišc conditions to ensure for itself enough energy and to protect it from denaturalizing elements that could create problems, causing the machinery to fail. Advances in šelds such as microscopy, biology, nanotechnology, and medicine offer us the opportunity to šnd and evaluate these failures by collecting, isolating, and studying some of the biological structures responsible for vital functions. The idea is to extract as much information as possible from them. In this way, we can gain a better understanding of these biological structures: their composition, their interaction with other similar structures or with different materials, and their reaction to external stimulus and to varying environmental conditions. It would, furthermore, allow us to predict, for instance, how cells will respond to the presence of a specišc drug
1.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................1 1.2 Link between the Macro, Micro, and Nanoworld .............................................2 1.3 Effects of Scaling Down ...................................................................................4 1.4 Challenges in the Manipulation of Biological Samples ....................................5
