Electroporation modeling of a single cell exposed to high-frequency nanosecond pulse bursts

This paper considers the electroporation characteristics of a cell under high-frequency nanosecond pulse bursts. A typical two-dimensional cell system, including an organelle membrane, was discretized into nodes using MATLAB, and the mesh transport network method model was established after the bidirectional coupling properties of electrical transport and pore transport were assigned to the nodes within this model. The dynamic process in single-cell electroporation under the application of 10 unipolar high-frequency nanosecond pulse bursts at 1 Hz to the target system was simulated and analyzed. The electroporation characteristics of a single pulse burst and multiple pulse bursts were evaluated. Particularly, the effect of intra-burst frequency on the average pore radius was examined. For the plasma membrane, when multiple pulses were applied, the pore number remained unchanged while the pore radius at the transition region exhibited a more obvious cumulative effect at higher intra-burst frequencies. For the organelle membrane, the number of pores significantly increased when the intra-burst frequency was high (1 MHz). Repetitive pulse bursts expanded the pore radius but do not change the pore number. The results of the present study further enrich our understanding of the electroporation mechanism of a pulsed electric field acting on biological cells.