ABSTRACT
In 2001, the world was rst introduced to a new kind of interaction between electric elds and biological systems. That is when Schoenbach et al. (2001) rst described the effect of intense pulsed electric elds in the nanosecond range (nsPEF) on cells and tissues. The two main distinguishing characteristics of these pulses is their large amplitude and their ability to penetrate past the outer plasma membrane into the interior of the cells and organelles located between the delivering electrodes. Before this, cells had never experienced intracellular electric elds of this duration and magnitude, and there is no doubt that the range of cellular responses to such elds will be quite diverse and complex. Here, I will discuss one such cellular response, the ability to convince the cells exposed to sufcient numbers of such short, high-voltage pulses to initiate a sequence of programmed cell death or apoptosis. We have named this response nanoelectroablation and have shown that it involves a truly nonthermal mechanism leading to programmed cell death.
