title: A novel approach to quantify the wound closure dynamic.
abstract: The Wound Healing (WH) assay is widely used to investigate cell migration in vitro, in order to reach a better understanding of many physiological and pathological phenomena. Several experimental factors, such as uneven cell density among different samples, can affect the reproducibility and reliability of this assay, leading to a discrepancy in the wound closure kinetics among data sets corresponding to the same cell sample. We observed a linear relationship between the wound closure velocity and cell density, and suggested a novel methodological approach, based on transport phenomena concepts, to overcome this source of error on the analysis of the Wound Healing assay. In particular, we propose a simple scaling of the experimental data, based on the interpretation of the wound closure as a diffusion-reaction process. We applied our methodology to the MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells, whose motility was perturbed by silencing or over-expressing genes involved in the control of cell migration. Our methodological approach leads to a significant improvement in the reproducibility and reliability in the in vitro WH assay.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica dei Materiali e della Produzione Industriale (DICMAPI) Università di Napoli Federico II, P.le Tecchio, 80, 80125 Napoli, Italy.
authors.forename: Flora
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ascione
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Biologia, Università di Napoli Federico II, Via Cintia 21 - Complesso Monte S.Angelo, 80126 Napoli, Italy.
authors.forename: Andrea Maria
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Guarino
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Biologia, Università di Napoli Federico II, Via Cintia 21 - Complesso Monte S.Angelo, 80126 Napoli, Italy.
authors.forename: Viola
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Calabrò
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica dei Materiali e della Produzione Industriale (DICMAPI) Università di Napoli Federico II, P.le Tecchio, 80, 80125 Napoli, Italy; CEINGE Biotecnologie Avanzate, Via Sergio Pansini, 5, 80131 Napoli, Italy; Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per la Scienza e Tecnologia dei Materiali (INSTM), UdR INSTM Napoli Federico II, P.le Tecchio, 80, 80125 Napoli, Italy. Electronic address: stefano.guido@unina.it.
authors.forename: Stefano
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Guido
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica dei Materiali e della Produzione Industriale (DICMAPI) Università di Napoli Federico II, P.le Tecchio, 80, 80125 Napoli, Italy; CEINGE Biotecnologie Avanzate, Via Sergio Pansini, 5, 80131 Napoli, Italy; Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per la Scienza e Tecnologia dei Materiali (INSTM), UdR INSTM Napoli Federico II, P.le Tecchio, 80, 80125 Napoli, Italy.
authors.forename: Sergio
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Caserta
mesh_terms: D045744:Cell Line, Tumor; D054443:Cell Migration Assays / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D002465:Cell Movement; D006801:Humans; D008856:Microscopy, Fluorescence / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D062326:Re-Epithelialization
keywords: Breast Cancer; Cell Migration; Cell Proliferation; Diffusion; Image Analysis; Mathematical modeling; Time-lapse Microscopy; Transport Phenomena; Wound Healing