Recognition of healthy and cancerous breast cells: Sensing the differences by dielectric spectroscopy

Abstract

PurposeThe response of human cells to applied electrical signals depends on the cellular health status, because it is influenced by the composition and structure of the main cellular components. Therefore, electrical impedance‐based techniques can be considered as sensitive tools to investigate healthy or disease state at cellular level. The goal of this study is to show that different types of in vitro cellular lines, related to different health status, can be differentiated using impedance spectra analysis.MethodsThree different types of human breast cell line, corresponding to healthy, cancerous, and metastatic adenocarcinoma cells, were measured by means of electrical impedance spectroscopy. By modeling the investigated cells with proper resistive and capacitive circuital elements, the magnitude of the cell electrical components and spectra of real and imaginary part of dielectric permittivity were obtained. The latter were subsequently examined with a commonly adopted mathematical model, in order to estimate the values of specific dielectric parameters for the three different cellular lines.ResultsThe relative variation of cellular capacitance with respect to that of the culture medium, estimated at 100 Hz, has a larger value for the two types of cancerous cells with respect to the noncancerous type. Furthermore, the ratio between the real and imaginary part of the dielectric permittivity function has larger values for metastatic cells with respect to the normal and nonmetastatic ones. Therefore, the mentioned relative capacitance allows to discriminate between normal and cancerous cells, whereas the results obtained for the dielectric function can discriminate between metastatic and nonmetastatic cells.ConclusionsThis study can be considered as an exploratory investigation of evaluating in vitro the health status of humans cells using selected electrical impedance parameters as potential markers. The obtained results highlight that a standard cultureware system, provided with interdigitated electrodes and appropriate impedance parameters, that is, cellular capacitance and the ratio between the imaginary and real part of cellular dielectric function, can be used to discriminate between healthy and cancerous breast cell lines, as well as different malignancy degrees.

Keratinocyte cellular damage induced by pesticide doses below the cytotoxic level evidenced by electrical impedance and broadband dielectric spectroscopy

“…It is worth observing that the magnitude of the healthy cellspecific membrane capacitances C m (table 1) agree with those reported for other types of living cells [19,29,[31][32][33].…”

“…Afterwards, we used the best fit parameters assigned to the cell compartments to reproduce the cell impedance Z cell and then the corresponding NPs (i.e.-ImZ cell vs ReZ cell ) and ϕ cell = arctan (ImZ cell /ReZ cell ). Scheme of the modified electrical circuit configuration adopted to simulate the cells-on-IDE impedance response [19,31]. With respect to classical living cells electrical models [9] the extracellular part and cytoplasmatic compartments are represented by Constant phase elements (Z CPE,cyt , Z CPE,ex ), rather than ohmic resistances.…”

“…In order to describe the electrical properties, we modeled the human confluent cell layer according to the circuit shown in figure 3, consisting of two sections. The first one is assigned to the resistive response of the solution (R IDE ) and the IDE shunt parasitic current, represented by a capacitive element C IDE,sh , [19,31]. The second section relates to the cell response.…”

“…Moreover, recent improvements have been achieved by the introduction of commercially available systems provided with electrical contact configurations. These improvements enable us to test the impedance response of living cells, either inside microfluidic devices [17,18] or forming confluent cell layers, by means of electrodes integrated in wells similar to those commonly used in biological investigations [19].…”

Broadband Dielectric Spectroscopy and Its Role in the Characterization of Biological Cells

“…Another recent study evaluated the behavior of normal or pathological cells in the breast tissue. Clear differences were observed between healthy and tumor cells in terms of permittivity, and in the case of the latter category, significant differences between primary and metastatic tumor cells (Ambrico et al, 2020). Important differences in electromagnetic field behavior are also recorded in the case of subtypes of human gliomas (Gavdush et al, 2021), Table 2 summarizing the most relevant findings.…”