Evaluation of Induced Voltage on Biological Cell Membranes

The application of pulsed electric fields (PEF) to biological cells induces trans-membrane potentials that can give rise to significant biological effects, predominantly electroporation. Recently, the effects of sub-microsecond intense electrical pulses (sm-PEF) on cellular organelles have been reported. In such applications, instantaneous power is high (~MW) but, due to the short pulse duration, energy delivered to cells and tissues is low (~nJ per cell). Electroporation is used mainly for transfections of exogenous materials, but many other interventions are possible, including microbial deactivation, whereas sm-PEF has shown particular promise in medical fields, including oncology. In this paper, the response of cells to PEF and sm-PEF is examined using an equivalent circuit model (ECM) where a network of electrical components is used to represent the cell and its environment. The model is validated through comparison with independent analytical and numerical studies. It is shown that the ECM, which is not computationally demanding, may be usefully adopted to examine how a cell and organelle respond to a wide range of cell parameters and pulse types. It is considered that such mathematical models, which can help to establish a quantitative link between the application of a time-varying electromagnetic pulse and the subsequent cell response, may allow the possible correlation between such responses and microbiological measurements to be investigated. It is anticipated that the development of these modeling approaches will aid in the analysis of those experimental measurements that are presently considered to be unattainable through real stochastic studies