Dielectric behavior of wild-type yeast and vacuole-deficient mutant over a frequency range of 10 kHz to 10 GHz.

Dielectric behavior of Saccharomyces cerevisiae wild-type and vacuole-deficient mutant cells has been studied over a frequency range of 10 kHz to 10 GHz. Both types of cells harvested at the early stationary growth phase showed dielectric dispersion that was phenomenologically formulated by a sum of three separate dispersion terms: beta 1-dispersion (main dispersion) and beta 2-dispersion (additional dispersion) and gamma-dispersion due to orientation of water molecules. The beta 1-dispersion centered at a few MHz, which has been extensively studied so far, is due to interfacial polarization (or the Maxwell-Wagner effect) related to the plasma membrane. The beta 2-dispersion for the vacuole-deficient mutant centered at approximately 50 MHz was explained by taking the cell wall into account, whereas, for the wild-type cells, the beta 2-dispersion around a few tens MHz involved the contributions from the vacuole and cell wall.