Speaker
Description
Biological systems have evolved in the presence of geological electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and to generate and use physiological EMFs to meet their most vital needs. It follows that EMFs can be used to modulate biological functions and are therefore worth investigating for therapeutic purposes. Therapeutic EMFs may aim to reproduce specific cues of physiological EMFs whose properties and functions have already been elucidated. Alternatively, EMFs that differ in their properties from physiological EMFs may nevertheless induce cellular responses that can be exploited with therapeutic aims. For example, electropermeabilization of cells following the application of EMFs is commonly used to vectorize agents ranging in size from small ions (e.g., Ca2+) to large molecules (e.g., DNA), or also to induce cell death. Electropermeabilization is traditionally induced by pulsed electric fields (PEFs), but other types of EMFs can also induce it. While focusing solely on the interactions of PEFs with cell membranes, differences in the ongoing physicochemical events and in the final biological outcomes can be related to the PEFs properties (pulse duration, electric field amplitude, pulses number, monopolarity or bipolarity). It follows that some PEFs are more suitable for certain applications. In the context of the application of subnanosecond duration PEFs (sub-nsPEFs) to the Escherichia coli model, we observed two types of induced cell permeabilization that showed different characteristics when studied at the molecular level, analyzed with microscopy or flow cytometry, or evaluated for long-term effects with survival/functional assay, which we hypothesize to be due to different mechanisms.
