Electrorotation analysis on artificial particles.
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- Biophysics
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Abstract
Dielectrophoresis and electrorotation are receiving increasing attention as useful phenomena for the characterisation and physical manipulation of cells. The primarily concern of this investigation was to determine whether these techniques can interpret accurately the dielectric properties of biological cells with an appropriate dielectric shell model. In this study, synthetic vesicles have been used as the testing samples in electrorotation experiments to verify the reliability of these techniques. By using the electrorotation technique with the dielectric shell models, dielectric properties of vesicles could be analysed very accurately and the results were in agreements with the observed morphology and membrane properties. The physical structure of the vesicles varied from a simple one such as unilamellar vesicle, to a more complex structure such as the oligolamellar and multilamellar form. The morphology and membrane structure of the vesicles were also characterised by fluorescence microscopy, flow cytometry and electron spin resonance using spin probes. This allowed this validification of the application of the dielectric shell theory for analysis of simple cellular systems. The second objective of this work was to extend the potential used of the electrorotation technique, and not only for the analysis of cellular systems. Electrorotation was also performed on single stranded DNA oligonucleotides, covalently bound onto the surface of microscopic-sized latex beads. Different types of the DNA oligonucleotides exhibited different electrorotation responses according to their different base sequences. This has shown that the electrorotation technique can be used as an analytic tool to identify different geqiiences of DNA oligonucleotide
Details
Original language | English |
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Award date | Sept 1996 |