Simulation of transmembrane potential in Escherichia coli induced by pulsed magnetic fields

In this work, we presented a simulation model to evaluate the evolution of the transmembrane potential (TMP) in Escherichia coli (E. coli) exposed to pulsed magnetic fields (PMF). The simulation results showed that the TMP of E. coli was always well below the threshold of 1V when only PMF was applied. Therefore, we introduced magnetic nanoparticles (Fe3O4-NPs) to improve the TMP of E. coli, and the simulation results showed that the TMP could be improved tens of times in the region of the cell membrane close to the magnetic nanoparticles, and this improvement gradually decreased with the increase of the distance between the cell membrane and the magnetic nanoparticles. Finally, our extended model was compared with the experimental results, and the comparison results showed that the computational model of TMP for E. coli constructed in this paper has important guiding significance for experimental research and practical applications.