Electrical measurement of adhesion and viability of living cells with a silicon chip

Silicon biochips are used to study, stimulate and manipulate single (mammalian) cells, whose viability and adhesion are usually studied via subjective, non quantitative, microscope observations. In this work an accurate equivalent model of the biochip/cell system has been developed and successfully applied to experiments, which have permitted to quantitatively correlate cell health status and changes in its membrane morphology to the measured impedance of such system.