The Lille Centre for Infection and Immunity has a unique atomic force microscopy (AFM) platform attached to the "Cellular Microbiology and Physics of Infection" research team, both under the responsibility of Frank Lafont. This platform is composed of 6 AFM microscopes allowing topography measurements of biological samples at the nanometer scale, quantification of mechanical properties and molecular and cellular adhesion properties.

- Bruker Catalyst coupled to a TIRF videomicrocope 2 Zeiss lasers in LNSB2

- Bruker Resolve coupled to a Zeiss Elyra PALM (super-resolution)

- Bruker FastScan Bio

- Bruker Multimode 8

- JPK Nanowizard 3 Ultra coupled to a STED/RESOLFT Abberior Instr. (super-resolution)

- JPK BioMat coupled to a Zeiss inverted microscope

The latter system features FluidFM technology for nanomanipulation and nanoinjection into biological objects. A Formlab 2 3D printer is also available on this platform.

The major original technical advances made thanks to this equipment and the know-how of the CMPI team are

- The introduction and validation of Stiffness tomography, which allows the determination of elasticity differences in biological objects such as cells (Roduit et al. Biophys J 2008, 2009; Janel et al. Nanoscale 2017);

- Correlative microscopy including electron and photon microscopy (including super-resolution) and atomic force microscopy (called CLAFEM, Janel et al., Methods Cell Biol 2017);

- The automation of force measurements in AFM (Dujardin et al. PLoS One 2019);

- The standardization of cell-based elasticity measurements (within the European consortia EU-COST AFM4NanoMed&Bio and EU-ITN Phys2BioMed, Schillers et al., Sci Report 2017).

As for the scientific findings, we can note:

- The identification of the adhesion receptor in N meningitidis (in collaboration with S Bourdoulous, Bernard et al. Nat Med 2012; Maïssa et al. Nat Comm 2017; Denis et al. Nat Microbiol 2019) ;

- Characterization of macroaperture formation in endothelial cells following cellular exposure to anthrax edematous factor or S aureus Edin (in collaboration with E Lemichez, Maddugoda et al., Cell Host &Microb 2011; Gonzalez-Rodriguez et al. Phys Rev Lett 2012; Stefani et al., Nat Comm 2017) ;

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