Our understanding of biological proteins does not
always correlate with how common or important they are. Half of all
proteins, molecules that play an integral role in cell processes,
are intrinsically disordered, which means many of the standard
techniques for probing biomolecules don’t work on them. Now
researchers at Kanazawa University in Japan have shown that their
home-grown high-speed atomic force microscopy technology can
provide information not just on the structures of these proteins
but also their dynamics.