Dielectric inspection of erythrocyte morphology.

We performed a systematic study of the sensitivity of dielectric spectroscopy to erythrocyte morphology. Namely, rabbit erythrocytes of four different shapes were prepared by precisely controlling the pH of the suspending medium, and their complex permittivities over the frequency range from 0.1 to 110 MHz were measured and analyzed. Their quantitative analysis shows that the characteristic frequency and the broadening parameter of the dielectric relaxation of interfacial polarization are highly specific to the erythrocyte shape, while they are insensitive to the cell volume fraction. Therefore, these two dielectric parameters can be used to differentiate erythrocytes of different shapes, if dielectric spectroscopy is applied to flow-cytometric inspection of single blood cells. In addition, we revealed the applicability and limitations of the analytical theory of interfacial polarization to explain the experimental permittivities of non-spherical erythrocytes.