ABSTRACT
From the electrical point of view, the cell can roughly be described as an electrolyte (the cytoplasm) surrounded by an electrically insulating shell (the plasma membrane). Physiologically, the surroundings of the cell also resemble an electrolyte quite closely. Under such conditions, when a cell is exposed to an external electric eld, the electric eld in its very vicinity concentrates within the membrane, which thus shields the cytoplasm from the exposure (this is the reason why the internal structure of the cell is not too important, except for very short pulses and very high eld frequencies discussed in Section 3.2.4). e concentration of the electric eld inside the membrane results in an electric potential di erence across it, termed the induced transmembrane voltage, which superimposes onto the resting transmembrane voltage typically present under physiological conditions. As the electric eld vanishes, so does the induced component of transmembrane voltage. is voltage a ects the functioning of voltage-gated membrane channels, initiates the action potentials, stimulates cardiac cells, and when su¤ciently large, it can also lead to cell membrane electroporation (Bedlack et al. 1994, Cheng et al. 1999, Neumann et al. 1999, Teissié et al. 1999, Burnett et al. 2003, Sharma and Tung 2004, Huang et al. 2006).
