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Bioelectricity

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In biology and biophysics, bioelectricity refers to any form of electricity generated within a biological organism or by some of its experimentally isolated parts, especially by a muscle or nerve. Bioelectricity might mean part of the subject matter of developmental biolectricity, neurophysiology, bioelectromagnetics, and/or related topics in biology and biophysics.

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  • … once a healthy cell sort of abandons ship and decides that it's going to just be, like, a ravenous, invasive cancer cell, its voltage changes radically. And what you can do with an ion channel drug is change the electrical state of that cell by messing with the ion channels. And in tadpole experiments — and this is early days, but this is moving really fast. In tadpole experiments, they were able to use ion channel drugs to keep cells that had been genetically engineered to be tumors from changing their electrical voltage, right? And without doing any kind of genetic mucking around, they kept these tumors from forming in tadpoles that had been genetically engineered to express tumors.
  • The plasma membrane is a heterogeneous structure whose thickness ia around 75 Å and which bounds the cell. An important constituent is lipid, which often represents as much as 70% of the membrane volume (depending on cell type). The membrane lipid readily excludes the passage of ions; it remains for imbedded proteins to form the channels which permit exchange of ions between intracellular and extracellular space.
    For nerve and muscle, electrical activation is associated with the movement of sodium and potassium (and other) ions across membranes by means of these channels; the proteins not only facilitate the flow of each ion but they control the flow of each giving rise to the selective permeability of the membrane.
  • Waste biomass is a cheap and relatively abundant source of electrons for microbes capable of producing electrical current outside the cell. Rapidly developing microbial electrochemical technologies, such as microbial fuel cells, are part of a diverse platform of future sustainable energy and chemical production technologies. We review the key advances that will enable the use of exoelectrogenic microorganisms to generate biofuels, hydrogen gas, methane, and other valuable inorganic and organic chemicals. Moreover, we examine the key challenges for implementing these systems and compare them to similar renewable energy technologies. Although commercial development is already underway in several different applications, ranging from wastewater treatment to industrial chemical production, further research is needed regarding efficiency, scalability, system lifetimes, and reliability.
    • Bruce E. Logan and Korneel Rabaey, (2012). "Conversion of Wastes into Bioelectricity and Chemicals by Using Microbial Electrochemical Technologies". Science 337 (6095): 686–690. DOI:10.1126/science.1217412.
  • Bioelectricity is about the electrical phenomena of life processes, and is a parallel to the medical subject electrophysiology. One basic mechanism is the energy consuming cell membrane ion pumps polarising a cell, and the action potential generated if the cell is excited and ion channels open. The dipolarisation process generates current flow also in the extracellular volume, which again results in measurable biopotential differences in the tissue. An important part of the subject is intracellular and extracellular single cell measurements with microelecroeds. Single neuron activity and signal transmission can be studied by recording potentials with multiple microelectrode arrays.
    In addition to measure on endogenic sources, bioelectricty also comprises the use of active stimulating current carrying (CC) electrodes. Since bioelectricity is about life processes the experiments are per definition in vivo or ex vivo.
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