study, the solutions
of lyz fibrils were diluted to 100-fold with water. Then, around 5
μL of this sample solution was adsorbed onto a freshly cleaved
muscovite ruby mica sheet (ASTM VI grade Ruby Mica from Micafab, Chennai,
India). Thereafter, the mica sheet was dried for 30 min in vacuum
in an inert atmosphere. The complexes were incubated for 15 min prior
to adsorption onto the mica sheet. AFM was performed in the AAC mode
on PicoPlus 5500 ILM AFM (Agilent Technologies, USA), which was attached
with a piezo-scanner of a maximum range of 9 μm. Here, microfabricated
silicon cantilevers of NANOSENSORS (USA) were used. The resonance
frequency of the cantilever oscillation was 146–236 kHz, whereas
the force constant was 21–98 N/m. The rate of the scan speed
was 0.5 lines/s while taking the images (256 by 256 pixels). All the
images were processed by flattening using PicoView software (Agilent
Technologies, 1.1 version), whereas their manipulation was conducted
by Pico Image Advanced version software.