Wound Healing & Invasion

Wound healing and invasion assays are used to screen pharmaceutical substances. Secondly, the migration behavior under such conditions can be applied to investigate cellular behavior on a molecular level. For the mentioned applications microscopy is a key technique. The new ibidi Culture-Insert is compatible with any flat and clean cell culture surface.

• Wound healing assays
  
• Invasion assays
  
• Migration assays
  
• Co-cultivation
  
• Defined cell seeding
  

Principle and Handling

Placed on a cell culture surface the Culture-Insert provides two cell culture reservoirs. The reservoirs are separated by a 500µm thick wall. Culturing cells in both reservoirs and removing the silicon insert from the surface results in two nicely defined cell patches separated by a zone of exactly the same width as the separation wall.

Due to the specially designed bottom, the Culture-Insert will stick itself to the surface. After removal from the surface the created gap (wound) will be clean and unchanged as no material will remain. The ibiTreat surface provides excellent cell growth in the non covered areas. The sticky design fully prevents cell growth under the walls. In this manner highly defined regions without cells will be created.

Invasion Assay

The interaction of two different cell types can be investigated by seeding them separately into the two wells. An important example is the invasion of tumor cells in a fibroblast culture. In these assays, cell specific fluorescent labels can be used to distinguish different cell populations.

ECIS Wounding Assay

The ECIS wound healing assay is based on an impedance measurement. Click here for further information.

Wound Healing Assays in Comparison

The scratch assay is a widely spread technique to investigate wound healing processes. Anyhow, it has certain drawbacks in reproducibility. This is mostly due to the fact that scratching might not only remove cells but also coatings from the surface. Even microscopic defects of several µm in deepness might appear. The width of the scratch generally depends on user specific parameters.

The Culture-Insert in combination with the ibiTreat surface of the µ-Dish overcomes the problems of the scratch assay. If removed there will be no changeto the ibiTreat surface as proven in tests with different kinds of cells like fibroblasts, keratinocytes, and several endothelial cell types.

In case of protein adhesion coatings we recommend performing suitable reference measurements in order to exclude effects on wound healing results generated from removing protein matrix together with the Culture-Insert.