ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors describe the main strategies to prepare supported lipid bilayer (SLB) that are suitable for atomic force microscopy (AFM) analysis. AFM has been extensively used to address the problem of lateral heterogeneity and segregation of lipids and proteins in biological membranes. The ability of AFM to explore biological membranes should also benefit from its coupling to other techniques such as polarized total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy. After a brief methodological description of AFM imaging in liquid, the authors review major advances in the exploration of the topology of SLBs, focusing on the study of membrane microdomains and of membrane proteins. Rupture of liposomes on mica and formation of SLB from a ternary mixture of lipids were observed at one image per second, meaning that this setup should be very useful to elucidate membrane phenomena such as microdomain nucleation, diffusion of nanoscale domains and diffusion of membrane components.
