Possible Effects of Electric Fields on a Pair of Spherical Cells

Abstract

Electric fields (EF) can induce some physiological or biological effects in neural tissues, which have been explored in many applications such as electroporation. The key to understand the possible underlying mechanisms of such effects tend to be the induced transmembrane potential. Although transmembrane potentials have already been the subject of many theoretical studies, most previous works concerning this topic are mainly focused on the situations of isolated cells. In previous studies, cells are often considered to be three-compartment models with different electroconductivities in different regions (the three compartments are often intracellular regions, membrane, and extracellular regions). In the present paper, we utilize a finite element method (FSM) (with the help of COMSOL^®) to calculate the induced transmembrane potential by the applied EF for a model of two neurons, which may have significant difference on electroporation.