Back Cover: Dielectrophoretic detection of electrical property changes of stored human red blood cells

DOI: 10.1002/elps.202100241 The back cover picture shows our method to measure the electrical properties of human red blood cells (RBCs) subjected to refrigerated storage over a period of 20 days. The RBCs are chemically crosslinked with glutaraldehyde in order to ionically freeze them in their electrical state immediately prior to analysis. As shown, we load a suspension of RBCs into small electrode pinholes. The electrodes are subjected to an electric field and we measure their resulting dielectrophoresis behavior using a 3DEP dielectrophoresis cytometer. Because crosslinked RBCs do not lose their ionic content during analysis, we are able to measure RBC electrical cytoplasm conductivity and membrane conductance changes as cells age in storage.