Single molecule reconstruction with atomic force microscopy

Scanning probe microscopies can be used to study the structure of individual molecules. However, this has been limited to molecules with a flat structure and no methods exist to extract the structure of unknown, individual, three-dimensional molecules. We will develop such methods based atomic force microscopy (AFM). We will use single-molecule recontruction techniques to allow detailed structural information of complicated three-dimensional molecules to be obtained. This would be a major scientific breakthrough and of extreme interest to a wide community of structural chemists, life scienctist and the applied research community.