Wound Healing
(Scratch Assay)

The wound healing assay, indispensable in cancer research, developmental studies, and tissue repair, is a standard in vitro technique for studying collective cell migration in two dimensions. It involves creating a cell-free area in a confluent monolayer through physical exclusion or mechanical, thermal, or chemical damage. This "sheet migration," typical of epithelial and endothelial monolayers, maintains intercellular junctions (Jonkman et al. 2014). Often called a ‘scratch assay,’ it is performed by scratching a cell monolayer (e.g., with a pipette tip) and capturing time-lapse images. Simple, inexpensive, and widely used, it models cell movement under controlled conditions (Grada et al. 2017).

The Image-Pro Wound Healing protocol offers an accurate and reproducible solution for analyzing assay data.