Build Your Own Scanning Tunneling Microscope

I don't want to spen writes "For all you fans of nanotech out there, a friend just posted me a link to instructions for building a scanning tunnelling microscope, from the University of Muenster. Interestingly, their licensing terms sound open source-ish to me: '(... We grant everybody the right to construct the microscope using the here-published design for private or educational purposes. On these web pages all necessary diagrams, drawings, material descriptions and software-source-codes are published for free access. While granting the right to build the microscope we make it mandatory that new developments, improvements or other applications of our design are also made openly available for private or educational purposes...)'"

Comments

Re:Question to all you bioinformaticians

[QuantumG]

no. To find the 3d structure of a protein or a virus you need to be able to crystalize it and then use a technique such as xray crystalography or NMR. There are some new techniques being developed based on mass spectography that can determine the structure of proteins that cannot be crystalized, but they're in their infancy. An STM simply can't be used, because the sample must be able to conduct a current (ie, it has to be a metal or something placed on top of a metal). Preparing samples for an STM is much like preparing samples for an electron microscope, you need to infuse the sample with a conductive material (usually gold) to be able to see it clearly.

Atomic force microsopes on the other hand can do some very neat work with small organic particals, but seperating something like an HIV from solution is still difficult, and usually involved crystalization.