Abstract
In the 1950s, Pohl (1951, 1958) described dielectrophoresis as the movement of neutral particles under the influence of nonuniform electric fields. In recent years, dielectrophoresis has developed rapidly and its present-day field of application is broad and diverse both in inanimate and in biological systems. For example, using dielectrophoresis it may be possible to filter nonconductive liquids (Fielding et al., 1975), to separate mineral powder mixtures into their component parts (Verschure and Ijlst, 1966), and to gain understanding of the behavior of disperse systems or colloids. This could prove to be a powerful aid in the interpretation of the anomalous polarization which occurs in heterogeneous systems (Santamaría et al., 1985). Regarding the properties of biological systems, dielectrophoresis has been used for analyzing phenomena such as: the frequency spectra of bacteria and yeast (Pohl and Crane, 1971); the behavior of living and nonliving cells (Pohl, 1978; Iglesias et al., 1984); and the response of cellular organelles (Ting et al., 1971). The application of dielectrophoresis to biological materials is also useful in analyzing phenomena of natural electric oscillation (Pohl, 1983), cell rotation (Zimmermann and Arnold, 1983), cellular spin resonance (Mischel and Lamprecht, 1980), cellular orientation (Teixeira-Pinto et al., 1960; Iglesias et al., 1985), and cell fusion or electrofusion (Neumann et al., 1980; Bates et al., 1987). However, although in most of the published papers consensus exists concerning the experimental setup and control of physical parameters, we have encountered few papers relating how the biological material was obtained. Accordingly, in the last few years we have attempted to study the behavior of microorganisms, mainly yeast, by dielectrophoresis. We carefully standardized biological parameters such as growth conditions, influence of shape, effect of the cell wall and so forth.
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Iglesias, F.J., Santamaría, C., López, M.C., Domínguez, A. (1989). Dielectrophoresis. In: Neumann, E., Sowers, A.E., Jordan, C.A. (eds) Electroporation and Electrofusion in Cell Biology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2528-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2528-2_3
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