Review of micro/nano technologies and theories for electroporation of biological cells

Electroporation (EP) is one of the important techniques for the introduction of genes and drugs into cells with intense pulsed electric field to induce nanometer-sized electropores on cell membranes. Recently, micro/nano technology has been applied to many novel micro EP devices which can not only significantly increase uptake of biomolecules, DNA transfection and cell viability, but also enable large-scale single-cell EP. However, most EP theories developed in the past three decades can not precisely predict the experimental results of EP of biological cells. With the advanced micro EP chips for large-scale single-cell EP experiments, more precise EP theoretical models can be developed to describe the complicated multiscale dynamic behavior of EP.