Time constant determination for electrical equivalent of biological cells

Abstract

The electric field interactions with biological cells are of significant interest in various biophysical and biomedical applications. In order to study such important aspect, it is necessary to evaluate the time constant in order to estimate the response time of living cells in the electric field (E-field). In the present study, the time constant is evaluated by considering the hypothesis of electrical analog of spherical shaped cells and assuming realistic values for capacitance and resistivity properties of cell/nuclear membrane, cytoplasm, and nucleus. In addition, the resistance of cytoplasm and nucleoplasm was computed based on simple geometrical considerations. Importantly, the analysis on the basis of first principles shows that the average values of time constant would be around 2–3 μs, assuming the theoretical capacitance values and the analytically computed resistance values. The implication of our analytical solution has been discussed in reference to the cellular adaptation processes such as atrophy/hypertrophy as well as the variation in electrical transport properties of cellular membrane/cytoplasm/nuclear membrane/nucleoplasm.