Abstract
Electroporation technique is widely used in biotechnology and medicine for the transport of various molecules through the membranes of biological cells. Different mathematical models of electroporation have been proposed in the literature to study pore formation in plasma and nuclear membranes. These studies are mainly based on models using a single isolated cell with a canonical shape. In this work, a space–time (x,y,t) multiphysics model based on quasi-static Maxwell’s equations and nonlinear Smoluchowski’s equation has been developed to investigate the electroporation phenomenon induced by pulsed electric field in multicellular systems having irregularly shape. The dielectric dispersion of the cell compartments such as nuclear and plasmatic membranes, cytoplasm, nucleoplasm and external medium have been incorporated into the numerical algorithm, too. Moreover, the irregular cell shapes have been modeled by using the Gielis transformations.
Highlights
Acoustic, electric, magnetic or optical fields are used for the physical manipulation of biological cells
Because of these modeling weaknesses and with the aim to perform computations on complex cell systems, we present here a full-dispersive and space–time multiphysics numerical model for computing the electric potential, current density, transmembrane voltage (TMV), and pore density in multicellular structures with irregular shaped cells
The pulsed electric field is generated by using two parallel-plate electrodes placed at the top and bottom of the cell system and the electric potential for each cell compartment has been calculated by numerically solving Equation (19)
Summary
Luciano Mescia 1, *,† , Michele Alessandro Chiapperino 1,† , Pietro Bia 2,† , Claudio Maria Lamacchia 1,† , Johan Gielis 3,† and Diego Caratelli 4,†. Design Solution Department, Elettronica S.p.A., Via Tiburtina Valeria Km 13,700, 00131 Rome, Italy; pietro.bia@elt.it. Received: 16 November 2018; Accepted: 20 December 2018; Published: 1 January 2019
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