Description

Electroporation is a membrane phenomenon which involves fundamental behavior of cell and artificial bilayer membranes. Electroporation is usually described as a formation of transient pores in the cell membrane in the presence of a strong electric field, which enables transport of molecules and ions across the cell membrane and increasingly attracts consideration for applications in biology, biotechnology and medicine. Understanding the basic mechanisms underlying electroporation is therefore important and provides the motivation of this thesis.Several experimental studies of electroporation showed a complex dependence of the transport across cellular membranes on pulse parameters. Current theoretical studies can describe pore formation in artificial lipid membranes but still cannot explain mechanisms of formation and properties of long-lived pores which are formed during cell electroporation.