In the past 40 years, the electrical stimulation is widely applied in biomedicine, largely due to the progress achieved in the experimental studies of electrical stimulation of cells. The obtained results are valuable for developing novel diagnosis and therapy techniques for diseases. Recent studies focused on the mechanism by which electrical stimulation alters cellular biological behavior, but the interpretation of many of related phenomena is difficult and controversial. We discuss the experimental equipment for electrical stimulation of cells from three aspects:the direct current electric field, the sinusoidal electric field and the pulsed electric field, and the effects of electrical stimulation on the mechanical properties of cells, including the elasticity modulus, the intercellular stress, the cell adhesion and the cell membrane tether force, as well as the corresponding biological mechanism and the application of electrical stimulation in inducing the cell differentiation, the apoptosis and changing the cell migration direction. The correlations among the electrical stimulation, the mechanical characteristics of cells and the biological behavior of cells are analyzed. Finally, we highlight the existing problems in the electrical stimulation of cells and put forward some suggestions for the future development.

electric stimulation  /  cell  /  bio-mechanics  /  diagnosis and therapy of disease