The Effect of Electrical Conductivity on Pore Resistance and Electroporation

Electroporation refers to the permeabilization of the cell membrane with one or multiple electric pulses. The reversible form of electroporation is widely applied for drug delivery, gene and cancer therapy, and stem cell research, among others; the irreversible form of electroporation is being explored for cancer treatment in a drug-free manner. In this work, an electroporation model is developed with particular focus on the prediction of pore resistance. The resulting formulation computes pore resistance as a function of pore size, and intracellular and extracellular conductivities, and avoids empirical or ad hoc specification of the conductivity of the pore-filling solution as practiced in previous works. Such a model is coupled at the whole cell level to investigate the effect of conductivity ratio on membrane permeabilization. The results reveal that the membrane achieves the maximum degree of permeabilization when the extracellular-to-intracellular conductivity ratio is around 0.5.