Biosensors and molecular imaging.

The increase in the understanding of the physical and functional properties of the biological material, from the cellular level down to single molecules, owes its success to the development of suitable high-sensitivity platforms to image the biomaterial and analyze its response to specific stimuli. Imaging has indeed reached molecular capabilities, thanks to optical or magnetic markers [1], to the atomic force microscopy (AFM) in surface reconstruction [2], and is nearing success in three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction thanks to X-ray holography [3].