In the last years an intense debate has arisen regarding the existence of non-thermal effects of electro-magnetic fields (EMF) on biological systems, i.e. effects due to a direct interaction between fields and matter without energy exchange.

Up to now, the literature is controversial in this sense and no clear and systematic experimental evidences are present. For this reason it is necessary to perform experiments that use simple protocols and study simple model organisms, so that many measurements can be performed easily under biologically and technically well controlled conditions.

We have performed measurement on a simple mono-cellular biological system, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisae representative of eukaryote cells. The yeasts were continuously submitted to static or AC magnetic fields for 6 hours, corresponding to 3 duplication times, and the cell proliferation of the exposed and the sham samples was checked. In particular the samples were exposed to static magnetic fields (MF) of 1G, 10G, 100G, 1000G and AC magnetic fields of 5G-50Hz, 5G-16Hz, 5G-8Hz

 Great attention was devoted to design a simple and repeatable experimental procedure and to reduce as much as possible the experimental errors.  Moreover, a careful evaluation of the errors involved in each step of the measure was done. test.

The results show the importance of the modulation of the magnetic fields. Indeed, a similar effect for S. cerevisiae exposed to a very high static magnetic field (1000 G) and to a lower value of magnetic field modulated at frequency of 50 Hz (5G-50Hz) was found. In both cases a decrease of about 12% in the cell concentration is detected with a confidence level of 2%. No effect is detected for all the other exposure conditions.

To explain the controversial results shown in literature about the effects of CEM on biological systems, one possibility is the interaction between the CEM and the nervous system  that produces different effects for different subjects. It is than important to study the possible effects of  CEM  on nervous cells.  

In collaboration with the Pharmacy Department measurements are in progress  to study the effect of CEM of 900 MHz , 1V/m on mouse astrocyte. Preliminary results have shown the Importance of modulation of CEM. Indeed, no effects were detected without modulation of the CEM while a difference in the cells vitality is present if the CEM is modulated.

Together with measurements of Delayed Luminescence (DL) on collagen, the dielectric permittivity has been measured on bovine Achilles’ tendon in the frequency range 500Hz-10MHz as a function of the water content. 

Changes in the dielectric permittivity as a function of the water content are similar to changes of the total number of photons emitted in Delayed Luminescence (DL) experiments.

The data at each frequency value show a sudden decrease of the permittivity when the tendon humidity decreases. Moreover the values of dielectric permittivity for low frequency are very high, like in some ferroelectric materials, and can not be explained using classical models.

These measurements allows to investigate the role of water network in collagen structure as well as the possible existance of collective states based on dipole-dipole electromagnetic interaction.