Abstract
It was recently shown that electrolysis may play a substantial detrimental role in microfluidic electroporation. To overcome this problem, we have developed a non-electrolytic micro/nano electroporation (NEME) electrode surface, in which the metal electrodes are coated with a dielectric. A COMSOL based numerical scheme was used to simultaneously calculate the excitation frequency and dielectric material properties dependent electric field delivered across the dielectric, fluid flow, electroporation field and Clausius-Mossotti factor for yeast and E. coli cells flowing in a channel flow across a NEME surface. A two-layer model for yeast and a three-layer model for E. coli was used. The numerical analysis shows that in NEME electroporation, the electric fields could induce electroporation and dielectrophoresis simultaneously. The simultaneous occurrence of electroporation and dielectrophoresis gives rise to several interesting phenomena. For example, we found that a certain frequency exists for which an intact yeast cell is drawn to the NEME electrode, and once electroporated, the yeast cell is pushed back in the bulk fluid. The results suggest that developing electroporation technologies that combine, simultaneously, electroporation and dielectrophoresis could lead to new applications. Obviously, this is an early stage numerical study and much more theoretical and experimental research is needed.
Highlights
Electroporation is the permeabilization of the cell membrane in response to the application of certain electric fields across the membrane, which can be reversible or irreversible[1,2,3,4,5]
This work reports results from numerical simulations using COMSOL, on the behavior of cells flowing over a non-electrolytic micro/nano-electroporation (NEME) surface, designed to induce non-electrolytic electroporation, by applying sinusoidal electric fields across a dielectric
When a cell moves in the direction of increasing electric fields, this is known as positive DEP and when the cell moves in the direction of decreasing electric fields, this is known as negative DEP
Summary
Electroporation is the permeabilization of the cell membrane in response to the application of certain electric fields across the membrane, which can be reversible or irreversible[1,2,3,4,5]. To completely eliminate electrolysis, we have designed a non-electrolytic micro/nano-electroporation (NEME) surface, in which the electroporation inducing electric fields are delivered to the target medium across a dielectric, with capacitive coupling[22,29]. While analyzing the “electric fields” generated for AC electroporation on the NEME surface described above[29], we have observed that the attendant “electric field gradients” are reminiscent of those used in many microfluidic devices, for dielectrophoresis[33,34,35,36,37,38,39] This raised the possibility that, while eliminating electrolysis during electroporation, our new non-electrolytic electroporation device may cause the simultaneous manifestation of dielectrophoresis and electroporation. Because different cell/surrounding media combinations have various dielectrophoretic properties, dielectrophoresis can be used for separation of cells[42,43,44,45,46,47,48])
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