Insulator based dielectrophoresis to predict electrocompetency during electroporation

Limitations on engineering Escherichia coli to accept foreign DNAs require us to build more chasses for synthetic biology. Electroporation is one of most widely used process to introduce foreign DNA into cells. However, electroporation protocols exist for a limited number of species and the existing method to develop electroporation protocols require cells to go through the entire electroporation process, which is insufficient, especially for slow-growth species. To fast develop protocols, we are developing insulator-based dielectrophoresis to for optimization of electroporation protocols with the hypothesized correlation between polarizability and electrocompetency. The dielectrophoresis is used to quantify polarizability of cells under electric field. The hypothesis is made based on the fact that both dielectrophoresis and electroporation is a result of charge redistribution under electric potential. We developed methods to validate the correlation and our initial experimental results show that higher polarizability leads to higher electrocompetency for E. coli.