Abstract
BackgroundAtomic force microscopy (AFM) is a relatively recently developed technique that shows a promising impact in the field of structural biology and biophysics. It has been used to image the molecular surface of membrane proteins at a lateral resolution of one nanometer or less. An immediate obstacle of characterizing surface features in AFM images is stripe noise. To better interpret structures at a sub-domain level, pre-processing of AFM images for removing stripe noises is necessary. Noise removal can be performed in either spatial or frequency domain. However, denoising processing in the frequency domain is a better solution for preserving edge sharpness.ResultsWe have developed a denoising protocol, called DeStripe, for AFM bio-molecular images that are contaminated with heavy and fine stripes. This program adopts a divide-and-conquer approach by dividing the Fourier spectrum of the image into central and off-center regions for noisy pixels detection and intensity restoration; it is also applicable to other images interfered with high-density stripes such as those acquired by the scanning electron microscope. The denoising effect brought by DeStripe provides better visualization for image objects without introducing additional artifacts into the restored image.ConclusionsThe DeStripe denoising effect on AFM images is illustrated in the present work. It allows extracting extended information from the topographic measurements and implicitly enhances the molecular features in the image. All the presented images were processed by DeStripe with the raw image as the only input without any requirement for other prior information. A web service, http://biodev.cea.fr/destripe, is available for running DeStripe.
Highlights
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a relatively recently developed technique that shows a promising impact in the field of structural biology and biophysics
We present two biological systems of which the topographic images were measured by AFM
We found that the AFM image quality profoundly depended on the study system
Summary
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a relatively recently developed technique that shows a promising impact in the field of structural biology and biophysics. To better interpret structures at a sub-domain level, pre-processing of AFM images for removing stripe noises is necessary. Because of its exceptional high signal/noise ratio, AFM is able to measure the topography of a single isolated molecule with a lateral resolution of a few nanometers and a vertical resolution of a few Angstroms [2]. Development of AFM imaging techniques in life sciences is progressing [4] including imaging single isolated molecules at high speed [5]. AFM is primarily an imaging tool, it allows measuring inter- and intra-molecular interactions on the pico-Newton scale [11,12,13,14] and force-probing the surfaces of living cells at the single molecule level [15,16] in order to map protein receptors for example [17]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
