Variation of TEER values during cell growth in a transwell with chopstick electrodes
This is an addendum to the results I posted in my previous blog. I am trying to simulate cell growth on a transwell device and perform TEER measurements using a small chopstick electrode pair configuration. I modeled transwell membrane with different membrane areas, and observed the effect of cell growth on TEER values. TEER values, after background subtraction, were multiplied with the total membrane area and plotted against membrane area, as follows.
As we had observed in previous posts, the product RxA is not constant, but in fact increases with the membrane area. This is also seen above by the blue lines. However, if we subtract this baseline and then multiply with the area, we get plateaued results as shown by the red line. This implies that, once the cells get confluent, their resistance dominates the system resistance, and the contribution from the background is insignificant. The non-uniform distribution of electric field caused due to geometrical asymmetries get normalized due to the overwhelming cellular resistances. This might be the reasons why the convention of reporting TEER as a product of resistance and membrane area remains valid.