Future perspectives of atomic force microscopy for biophysics

Though atomic force microscopy (AFM) has achieved great success in nondestructively characterizing the structures and properties of various biological systems under aqueous conditions with an unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution, there is still huge room for further improvements in the biomedical applications of AFM. In this chapter, the future perspectives of AFM for biophysics are given, mainly including deciphering AFM data, improving the efficiency of AFM experiments, increasing the throughput of AFM assays, detecting cellular and subcellular activities at the same cell level with AFM, and making the conditions of AFM studies closer to in vivo environments.