Closed-looped nano stimulation microscope for living cell membrane

Abstract

Electron-beam could stimulate a living cell membrane through a tOO-nm-thick SiN nanomembrane. We designed a co-axial dual microscope with an electron-beam lithography system and a fluorescence microscope to investigate bio-molecular dynamic system of living cell membrane. This microscope had a closed-looped controlling system using the fluorescence live cell imaging and the electron beam induced stimulation. The live cell imaging of the fluorescence microscope provides the chemical identity of the target molecule and the response to a following stimulation on the cell membrane, and the electron-beam can induce electro-chemical stimulation in hundreds nanometer resolution. Scanning of the electron-beam could provide high-speed, precise, and large scale stimulation on the target molecules. We attempted that the combination with this stimulation system and fluorescence microscope would provide the closed-loop control of the bio-molecule system on cell membrane. We proposed here the concept of the virtual molecule environmental display to study the functional changes on the target behavior due to our closed-loop control system on this co axial microscope.