Model Biological Membranes and Possibilities of Application of Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy for their Characterization

Abstract

Biological membranes are essential parts of living systems. They represent an interface between intracellular and extracellular space. Depending on their structure, they often perform very complex functions and play an important role in the transport of both charged and uncharged particles in any organism. Structure of the biological membranes, which play very important role in electrochemical processes inside living organisms, is very complicated and still not precisely defined and explained. Model lipid membranes are used to gain detail information about properties of real biological membranes and about associated electrochemical processes. Electrochemistry, especially electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), can play a useful role in the characterization of properties of model lipid membranes (planar and supported lipid bilayers, tethered lipid membranes, liposomes, etc.). This review is focused on model biological membranes and the possibilities and limitations of electrochemical methods and namely of EIS in this field.

The Impact of Membrane Composition and Co‐Drug Synergistic Effects on Vancomycin Association with Model Membranes from Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy

“…For EIS data analyses and presentation, readers can refer to various literatures and the references cited therein. [25,[49][50][51] For quantitative insight, we extracted the membrane resistance values (R M ) of the lipid bilayer by fitting the EIS data to the ECM as shown in Scheme 1b. The relative change in resistance and capacitance values before and after drug addition, extracted from the fit, are summarized in Table 1 and Table S1(SI) respectively.…”

The influence of the pH on the incorporation of caffeic acid into biomimetic membranes and cancer cells

“…cal impedance spectroscopy is used in a plethora of biological [30][31][32] and non-biological applications 33 . EIS is often applied as an analytic tool to support or confirm data obtained in other electrochemical methods such as cyclic or quadratic voltammetry.…”

Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy for Real-Time Detection of Lipid Membrane Damage Based on a Porous Self-Assembly Monolayer Support

“…To detect the membrane damage, three lipid membrane structures including planar bilayer lipid membrane (BLM), black lipid membrane, and vesicles have been used as typical models, in which the BLM model system was mostly used due to its good stability, a long lifespan, a short formation time, and thickness comparable to biomembranes. With the addition of chemical toxins or biomolecules into the system, the final structure and permeability changes of BLMs can be detected by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), fluorescence, and potential clamp, etc. − However, it is still challenging to distinguish the membrane damage pathway by the techniques. So far the only approach to provide the information about membrane damage pathways is real time atomic force microscopy (AFM) or scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), which is high-cost, poor-reproducibility, and inconvenient.…”

“…EIS is one of the commonly employed techniques to investigate the electrical properties of the membrane. ,, With an appropriate equivalent electric circuit (EEC) analysis, some parameters related with the electric and electron transfer properties on and cross the membrane can be extracted. However, to ensure the structure stability and the biocompatibility of BLM, a self-assembly monolayer (SAM) was commonly used to separate the BLM and the conductive substrate, which greatly decrease the sensitivity of EIS.…”