A Lab-Made Wound Maker for Analysis of Cell Migration in a 96-Well Plate

Cell migration is a central process for recovering from wounds triggered by physical distress besides embryogenesis and cancer metastasis. Wound healing assay is widely used as a fundamental research technique for investigation of two-dimensional cell migration in vitro. The most common approach for imitating physical wound in vitro is mechanical scratching on the surface of the confluent monolayer by using sharp materials. The iron metal pin with a suspension spring for fine adjustment of the orthogonal contact surface between the scratching point and the individual bottom of multi-well plate with planar curvatures were adopted for the creative invention of a 96-well plate wound maker. While classic tips drew diverse and zigzag scratching patterns on the confluent monolayer, our wound maker displayed synchronized linear wounds in the middle of each well of a 96-well plate that was seeded with several cell lines. Given that several types of multi-well plates commercially available are compatible with our lab-made wound maker for creating uniform scratches on the confluent monolayer for the collective cell migration in wound healing assay, it is certain that the application of this wound maker to the real-time wound healing assay in high content screening (HCS) is superior than utilization of typical polypropylene pipette tips.