Extreme Elongation of Vesicles Under DC Electric Fields

Motive. The motivation of the current study is to investigate the response of vesicles to applied electric fields, with potential applications in electroporation-mediated molecular delivery [3]. In this technique, an applied field transiently permeabilizes the cell membrane to gain access to the cytoplasm, and deliver active agents such as genes, RNA, proteins into the cell. Although widely applied in classical and emerging areas such as drug delivery and stem cell research, current electroporation techniques suffer from low efficiency and high cell death [4]. The present work is a step towards understanding the complex fundamental processes involved in electroporation, and possibly improving it via parametric optimization. For this purpose we use vesicular cellular mimics as our model to provide good controllability, and to focus on the dynamics of the lipid membrane. Our preliminary results show extreme elongation of the vesicles under high-strength, short-duration DC pulses. Such deformation may significantly affect electroporation, and hence the efficiency of molecular delivery.Copyright © 2008 by ASME