Influence of ethanol on the high frequency electric polarizability of E. coli

Influence of the medium electrolyte concentration on the electric polarizability of bacteria Escherichia coli in presence of ethanol

“…1 and 2 show that a similar tendency is observed in presence of ethanol too. In this case the decrease in the polarizability value could be interpreted as a sum of the decrease in EChD component (electrolyte effect) and the decrease in IMW component (decrease in the cytoplasm electrolyte concentration) resulting from the increase in the permeability of the ethanol damaged membrane (ethanol effect) [13].…”

“…It has been proved that the inner electrolyte concentration To distinguish the contribution of IMW polarizability we have carried out the experiments in presence of ethanol [13]. The main ethanol effect was found to be increasing the membrane permeability, possibly by damaging the cell wall.…”

“…The existence of two charged surfaces of bacteria cover leads to consider two ChD components-external (EChD) and internal (IChD). So, we take into account four components of the electric polarizability [12][13][14] like it was suggested for erythrocytes [5]. The considering of only two polarizability components is correct in the case of solid particles, but it has been applied for bacteria by now too [6,7,11].…”

“…In our articles regarding bacteria electric polarizability we have suggested an experimental way for distinguishing the types of surface polarizability by changing the outer and inner electrolyte concentration and with the frequency of the applied electric field [12][13][14]. Our approach is based on a principle difference between ChD and MW polarizability components-they have completely opposite behavior by varying the ionic strength: ChD polarizability decreases [6,7,11] and MW one increases [1,10] with the increase in the electrolyte concentration.…”

Electric polarizability changes during E. coli culture growth

“…A possible reason for this is the change in the size of the bacterial cells and the intracellular electrolyte concentration. The influence of the last parameter was investigated in our previous work [13] by an ethanol-induced increase of the membrane permeability [14]. So a possible way to study the contribution of MW and SChD components of the polarizability is the investigation of the change in the bacteria size and polarizability during the culture growth.…”