The dependence of induced transmembrane potential on the cell electrodeformation and its correlation with cell electrotransfection efficiency

Abstract

Electroporation is a widely established method that uses electric fields to enhance molecular transport across plasma membrane. Nowadays, it is used for drug and gene delivery into the cells and tissues for therapeutic purposes and for the extraction of bioactive compounds from tissues during food processing. In our study we have investigated efficiency of molecular electrotransfer in dependence of medium conductivity and presence of plasmid DNA in an electroporation medium. We have observed the inverse dependence between the conductivity of electroporation medium and the efficiency of the molecular transport to the Chinese Hamster Ovary cells. We have seen that efficiency of small molecule electrotransfer decays when the electroporation medium conductivity increases. We observed the same results when transfecting the cells with plasmid DNA. We propose that this dependency may at least in part be caused by the differential electrodeformation of the cells in the external media that have higher or lower conductivity than the cell cytoplasm. [...]