Atomic force microscopy is a technique particularly adapted to the study of flat objects. The possibility to use it in an aqueous environment makes it a unique tool in biology, providing high resolution structural information of biological membranes. Here we will review atomic force microscopy advances in the study of membrane protein imaging, covering reconstituted proteins in lipid bilayers, native membranes and reviewing function-related imaging and its outcomes.
A brief survey is given on the elementary reactions of photosynthesis, with an emphasis on the functional separation into reaction centers that perform, after excitation, an ultrafast charge separation across the photosynthetic membrane, and light-harvesting complexes that absorb light and transfer the excitation energy to the reaction centers. The basic concepts are compared to those of photovoltaics.
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