Measurement of Electrical Properties of Sickle Cells From Electrical Impedance of Cell Suspension

Abstract

Analysis of the electrical properties of a biological cell can provide useful information about its characteristic features, such as the intracellular composition, charge distribution and composition changes in cell membrane, as well as the extracellular environment. Electrical impedance spectroscopy of a cell suspension can be used to extract an average measure of the electrical properties of single cells. In sickle cell disease, the disease state of a sickle red blood cell is closely related to the intracellular hemoglobin composition and concentration. This study presents an electrical impedance measurement of sickle cell suspension with normal red blood cells as control. Electrical impedance spectra of cell suspensions are obtained in the range of 1000 Hz to 1MHz. Based on Maxwell’s mixture theory, average values of membrane capacitance and cytoplasm resistance of single cells are extracted for both normal and sickle blood samples. Comparing to traditional parallel-plate setup for cell suspension subjected to frequency sweep, this method requires low quantity of blood specimens and can be potentially valuable for patients that are already anemic.