Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy (SICM)

ICAPPIC SICM/SECM/SECCM/AFM Equipment

SICM principle of operation: Hopping mode protocol

Principle of scanning ion conductance microscopy-10/02/2026, 11:47.mp4

Principle of scanning ion conductance microscopy-10/02/2026, 11:48.mp4

The principle of HPCIM: the pipette is withdrawn to a position that is well above the sample before approaching the surface

Topographical images of the same fixed hippocampal neuron obtained first with hopping mode (d) and then with continuous left-to-right raster scan mode; An arrow in (d) points to the fine processes that have been damaged during raster scanning

Principles of adaptive HPCIM: The field of view is divided into equally-sized squares (bottom left). Before imaging each square, the roughness of the sample in this square is estimated at the corners (middle left). Very rough squares are imaged at high resolution, while smoother squares are imaged at low resolution (top left). The right panel is a three-dimensional topographical rendered image of a hippocampal pyramidal neuron that was acquired by the adaptive scanning algorithm within 15 min.

Image Captured by SICM

HeLa cells

Neural network

Sperm cells

Resolution of SICM

A)Scheme of the high-resolution SICM experimental setup and SEM image of the tip of a typical nanopipette.

B)A typical raw SICM image of the S-layer protein of Bacillus sphaericus on a mica surface.

C)S-layer protein width and height distributions based on SICM measurements.

D)Smaller-range scan of the sample.

E)2D FFT of the image in (D).

F) FFT-filtered image produced from (D) by selecting nine pairs of spots in the power spectrum in (E). The inset shows the correlation-averaged image of S-layer proteins calculated from the FFT-filtered data.

High resolution mapping

Single molecule delivery to and collection from living cells

Single molecule delivery into living cells

During delivery, the current is monitored in real-time, and the translocation of a single analyte disrupts the current baseline and appears as a peak, quantifying the number of peaks and thus revealing the number of molecules delivered to the cell

SICM-controlled single-cell cytosol collection using potential-driven electroporation

Untitled video-11/02/2026, 13:34.mp4

Single-cell nanobiopsy enables multigenerational longitudinal transcriptomics of cancer

A double-barrel nanopipette integrated into a SICM is brought in proximity of the cellular membrane (A) where it penetrates the latter enabling the release of the fluorophore through the aqueous barrel (B) and cytoplasmic extractions through the organic barrel (C). After the extraction, the sample containing RNA transcripts is released in a lysis buffer and it is reverse-transcribed, amplified, and sequenced for downstream gene expression analysis via bioinformatics (D).

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