TRANSMEMBRANE VOLTAGE DUE TO ELECTROBIOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS

Abstract

The interactions of electromagnetic fields and biological structures are of great interest both from medical and technological points of view. The medical aspect is well‐known even in archaic medicine while bio‐electrotechnology is being developed just at recent time. Especially it is readily seen when dealing with electric field and its influence on living cells. Biologists and biochemists are mainly interested in the voltage induced in the cell membrane (transmembrane voltage). This gives the information about forces acting on membrane which cause the phenomenon called dielectrophoresis. The other phenomenon which joins electromagnetic field and biological structures is electroporesity when the pores in a membrane are caused by electric field. It seems that the latter case requires carefully carried calculations since the transmembrane voltage decides on the phenomenon. The paper, however, does not aim at very biological effect; our goal is to show how the electric field in the cell and the membrane voltage should be calculated. It should be stressed that the research in bio‐electromagnetism is on very initial step as concerns the calculation methods. This results from two facts: the first is that so far there were no links between people working on computational electromagnetism and biologists and the second comes from the complex nature of biological structures which cannot be modelled as easy as it is with technical products. Thus, the paper is aiming at showing how the cell is modelled and what the main dependencies which govern electromagnetic phenomena are. This may be considered as an introductory step to further activity in this area.

Citation

Krawczyk, A. and Skoczkowski, T. (1994), "TRANSMEMBRANE VOLTAGE DUE TO ELECTROBIOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS", COMPEL - The international journal for computation and mathematics in electrical and electronic engineering, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 195-198. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb051873