Atomic force microscopy (AFM) offers a powerful biophysical technique that facilitates the imaging of living cells under physiological buffer conditions.  However, AFM in isolation cannot discriminate between different cell types within heterogeneous samples for example in a solid biopsy.  The current studies demonstrate the potential of AFM in combination with correlative fluorescence optical sectioning microscopy for live cell imaging.  Furthermore, this work establishes the advantage of fluorescence-AFM imaging to distinguish and analyse single-cell bio-physical properties in mixed human cell populations, in real-time.  Critically, our results show that correlative fluorescence-AFM imaging allows the simultaneous co-localised detection of fluorescence coupled with nano-mechanical mapping. 
AFM