Atomic force microscopy-based approaches for single-molecule investigation of nucleic acid–protein complexes

The interaction of nucleic acids with proteins plays an important role in many fundamental biological processes in living cells, including replication, transcription, and translation. Therefore, understanding nucleic acid–protein interaction is of high relevance in many areas of biology, medicine and technology. During almost four decades of its existence atomic force microscopy (AFM) accumulated a significant experience in investigation of biological molecules at a single-molecule level. AFM has become a powerful tool of molecular biology and biophysics providing unique information about properties, structure, and functioning of biomolecules. Despite a great variety of nucleic acid–protein systems under AFM investigations, there are a number of typical approaches for such studies. This review is devoted to the analysis of the typical AFM-based approaches of investigation of DNA (RNA)–protein complexes with a major focus on transcription studies. The basic strategies of AFM analysis of nucleic acid–protein complexes including investigation of the products of DNA–protein reactions and real-time dynamics of DNA–protein interaction are categorized and described by the example of the most relevant research studies. The described approaches and protocols have many universal features and, therefore, are applicable for future AFM studies of various nucleic acid–protein systems.