Abstract:
This thesis studies the examination of cell-membrane permeability resulting from electroporation by the application of impedance analysis. The objective of the research is to measure impedance of cell by using a microfluidic system to control the direction of electric field and current in the measurement and to apply the impedance measurement to monitor the electroporation behavior of cell. Three types of cells, butterfly pea cells, J774 macrophage cell and Canine MCT cell, were used in this study. The impedance measurement used the frequency in the range of 10 kHz to 100 kHz. The application of microfluidics enabled the electroporation by small voltages ranging from 2 Vp to 4 Vp. The corrected total cell fluorescence (CTCF) was incorporated with the impedance measurement to determine the cell membrane permeability. The appropriate condition for temporary electroporation of canine MCT cell was 15 sets of 2.5 Vp, 20-kHz frequency, and 50 cycles. The condition yielded 50% efficiency. Temporary and permanent electroporation cells was discriminated by using a combination of Yo-Pro-1 and Propidium iodide (PI) fluorescent dyes. The examination of cell-membrane permeability by impedance measurement could be done through conductance measurement. The size of the membrane opening could be quantitatively examined based on the difference between the conductance in the absence of cell and that in the existence of cell after applying pulse to activate poration (∆GC). The cell-membrane recovery with time could not be examined by measuring the conductance due to the temporal increase of the suspending medium, which counteracted the conductance change by cell membrane recovery. In addition, a slight increase of pulse voltage could cause permanent cell-membrane breakdown. Whereas, electroporation could not be clearly observed with reducing the voltage or cycles.