Published new post (Size‐Independent Transmembrane Transporting of Single Tetrahedral DNA Nanostructures) on NANOSENSORS Blog Targeted drug delivery and precision medicine have now become a new paradigm in cancer therapy, with nanocarriers, pharmacologically active drugs could be directly delivered into target cancer cells to manage or reverse the course of disease. Nevertheless, the recent critical issue for drug delivery systems is lack of efficient drug delivery carriers.* DNA nanostructures have attracted considerable attention as drug delivery carriers. However, the transmembrane kinetics of DNA nanostructures remains less explored.* In the article “Size‐Independent Transmembrane Transporting of Single Tetrahedral DNA Nanostructures” Xi Chen, Falin Tian, Min Li, Haijiao Xu, Mingjun Cai, Qian Li, Xiaolei Zuo, Hongda Wang, Xinghua Shi, Chunhai Fan, Huricha Baigude and Yuping Shan describe how they monitored the dynamic process of transporting single tetrahedral DNA nanostructures (TDNs) monitored in real time using a force-tracing technique based on atomic force microscopy.* The authors used special NANOSENSORS™ PointProbe® Plus PPP-BSI AFM probes for the single-molecule force tracing. The NANOSENSORS PPP-BSI AFM tips were modified in two steps as described in their article: First they were washed by Piranha solution (V(H2SO4):V(H2O2) = 3:1) for 1 h, cleaned with ultrapure water twice and absolute ethylacohol once then the AFM tips were dried by argon gas, and cleaned under O3 for 30 min to remove other impurities. After cleaning, the AFM tips were modified with 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane[17] to generate amino group, it was convenient for linking the heterobifunctional PEG (MAL-PEG2000-SCM, FW≈2000, SensoPathechnologies, Bozeman, MT 1 mg mL−1). After drying with argon, the tips were immersed in a mixture of 100 × 10−9m TDNs, 50 μL NH2OH-reagent (500 × 10−3m NH2OH•HCl, 25 × 10−3m EDTA, pH 7.5), and 50 μL buffer A (100 × 10−3m NaCl, 50 × 10−3m NaH2PO4, 1 × 10−3m EDTA, pH 7.5). After functionalization for 1 h, the AFM tips were washed with PBS for three times and stored at 4 °C .* Please have a look at the NANOSENSORS blog for the full citation and a direct link to the full article #forcetracing #AtomicForceMicroscopy #DNAnanostructures #bsp2020