Cell Migration: Developmental Methods

Abstract

The wound-healing assay is simple, inexpensive, and one of the earliest developed methods to study directional cell migration in vitro. This method mimics cell migration during wound healing in vivo. The basic steps involve creating a “wound” in a cell monolayer, capturing the images at the beginning and at regular intervals during cell migration to close the wound, and comparing the images to quantify the migration rate of the cells. It is particularly suitable for studies on the effects of cell-matrix and cell-cell interactions on cell migration. A variation of this method that tracks the migration of individual cells in the leading edge of the wound is also described in this chapter.