Atomic force microscopy uses a sharp tip probe for nanoscale imaging of surface topography, including living cells.

“instead of using light or electrons it uses a very sharp tip probe that can be so sharp it's monoatomic and it essentially raster scans across the sample and can detect very subtle changes in the topography of the sample that you're scanning right so it actually spawned the whole nanotechnology world so this particular instrument was used to characterize materials and really help develop Silicon Valley in many ways and it's a microscope that we took basically an off-the-shelf atomic force microscope that gives you the scanning resolution of an electron microscope but also has the capacity to image living cells”