First-principle approach to dielectric behavior of nonspherical cell suspensions

We present a theoretical study of the dielectric behavior of cell suspensions by employing the Bergman-Milton spectral representation of the effective dielectric constant. By means of the spectral representation, we derive the dielectric dispersion spectrum in terms of the electrical and structure parameters of the cell models. Our results show that a better agreement with the experimental data can be obtained, provided that we introduce a conductivity contrast t=σ₂/(σ₂-σ₁). We find that the conductivity of the cell cytoplasm σ₁ can be much larger than that of the suspending medium σ₂, in contrast to the previous claim that σ₁≈σ₂.