Figure 2
From: Nanobiopsy investigation of the subcellular mtDNA heteroplasmy in human tissues

The nanobiopsy platform can be integrated into an inverted fluorescent or confocal microscope set-up. (a) The nanobiospy apparatus is housed within a Faraday cage to minimise electromagnetic noise (a). The nanobiopsy apparatus itself comprises a piezo motor which facilitates sub-micron manipulation of the micropipette (b), an amplifier (c) which modulates the current and voltage within the working (f) and reference electrodes (e) and a pipette (d). Control of the nanobiopsy is achieved and co-ordinated using the Scanning Ion-Conductance Microscope controller and corresponding software. The sample of interest is immersed in an aqueous solution and as the pipette moves towards the sample, the ion current passing between the working (f) and reference (e) electrodes is increasingly occluded allowing real-time feedback of relative pipette position. This facilitates the highly-precise entry into and sampling from specimens such as human skeletal muscle tissue (g). Adapted from Bury et al., 202245.