Setting Up a Bio-AFM to Study Protein Misfolding in Neurodegenerative Diseases

The clinical pathology of neurodegenerative diseases suggests that earlier onset and progression are related to the accumulation of protein aggregates due to misfolding. A prominent way to extract useful information regarding single-molecule studies of protein misfolding at the nanoscale is by capturing the unbinding molecular forces through forced mechanical tension generated and monitored by an atomic force microscopy-based single-molecule force spectroscopy (AFM-SMFS). This AFM-driven process results in an amount of data in the form of force versus molecular extension plots (force-distance curves), the statistical analysis of which can provide insights into the underlying energy landscape and assess a number of characteristic elastic and kinetic molecular parameters of the investigated sample. This chapter outlines the setup of a bio-AFM-based SMFS technique for single-molecule probing. The infrastructure used as a reference for this presentation is the Bruker ForceRobot300.