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Micro-electroporation of mesenchymal stem cells with alternating electrical current pulses

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Abstract

Micro-electroporation is an electroporation technology in which the electrical field that induces cell membrane poration is focused onto a single cell contained in a micro-electromechanical structure. Micro-electroporation has many unique attributes including that it facilitates real time control over the process of electroporation at the single cell level. Flow-through micro-electroporation expands on this principle and was developed to facilitate electroporation of a large numbers of cells with control over the electroporation of every single cell. However, our studies show that when electroporation employs conventional direct current (DC) electrical pulses the micro-electroporation system fails, because of electrolysis induced gas bubble formation. We report in this study that when certain alternating currents (AC) electrical pulses are used for micro-electroporation it becomes possible to avoid electrolytic gas bubble formation in a micro-electroporation flow-through system. The effect of AC micro-electroporation on electrolysis was found to depend on the AC frequency used. This concept was tested with mesenchymal stem cells and preliminary results show successful electroporation using this system.

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Acknowledgments

Partial financial support was provided by the Hebrew University/Johnson&Johnson Fund for Innovative Science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Bioengineering in the Service of Humanity and Society, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, 91904

    Roee Ziv & Boris Rubinsky

  2. Skeletal Biotechnology Laboratory, Hebrew University—Hadassah Medical Campus, P.O. Box 12272, Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, Israel, 91120

    Yair Steinhardt, Gadi Pelled & Dan Gazit

  3. Stem Cell Therapeutics Research Lab, Department of Surgery, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Dan Gazit

Authors
  1. Roee Ziv
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  2. Yair Steinhardt
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  3. Gadi Pelled
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  4. Dan Gazit
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  5. Boris Rubinsky
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dan Gazit.

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Roee Ziv and Yair Steinhardt contributed equally to this publication.

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Ziv, R., Steinhardt, Y., Pelled, G. et al. Micro-electroporation of mesenchymal stem cells with alternating electrical current pulses. Biomed Microdevices 11, 95–101 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10544-008-9213-4

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