Simple cytosensor based electrical characterization of keratinocytes and fibroblasts with prime molecular expressions towards skin tissue engineering applications

Investigation of electrical properties along with molecular expressions of the keratinocyte and fibroblast under different physiological conditions can provide insight into their functioning which can contribute significantly towards skin tissue engineering application. For electrical characterization, cell based biosensors are usually designed with photolithographically patterned electrodes which are of the dimensions of cells. This increases cost and complexity of the analysis. In this paper, we report electrical characterization of keratinocyte and fibroblast cells, cultured in DMEM-F12 and DMEM media with a low cost and sensitive macroporous silicon platform using simple electrode geometries for the first time. Impedance spectroscopy results show that, there is a distinct difference between the electrical properties like effective capacitance and resistance of HaCaT (keratinocyte) and 3T3 (fibroblast) cells in the frequency range from 100Hz to 1MHz. The keratinocyte cells are observed to possess lower impedance than the fibroblast cells. The differences in the electrical properties have been correlated with the immunocytochemically detected prime molecular expressions of these cells. This multimodal analysis will help in the estimation of the degree of normalcy of these cells through a less complex and low cost electrical route.