ArticlePloS one2011
Tension, free space, and cell damage in a microfluidic wound healing assay.
Article in PloS one, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pooled it
- Engineering the Healing Process: Advanced In Vitro Wound Models and Technologies.Biomedicines · 2026Review
- Skin-on-chip: Quo vadis?APL bioengineering · 2025Review
- The Role of TGF-β1 and MutantCancers · 2024Article
- Microfluidic Wound-Healing Assay for Comparative Study on Fluid Dynamic, Chemical and Mechanical Wounding on Microglia BV2 Migration.Micromachines · 2024Article
- Confinement induces internal flows in adherent cell aggregates.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- An effective device to enable consistent scratches for in vitro scratch assays.BMC biotechnology · 2023Article
- Microfluidic and Lab-on-a-Chip Systems for Cutaneous Wound Healing Studies.Pharmaceutics · 2021Review
- Article
- Probing coordinated co-culture cancer related motility through differential micro-compartmentalized elastic substrates.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Microphysiological systems for the modeling of wound healing and evaluation of pro-healing therapies.Journal of materials chemistry. B · 2020Review
- Effects of Substrate-Coating Materials on the Wound-Healing Process.Materials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- Deletion of sorting nexin 27 suppresses proliferation in highly aggressive breast cancer MDA-MB-231 cells in vitro and in vivo.BMC cancer · 2019Article
- Investigation of wound healing process guided by nano-scale topographic patterns integrated within a microfluidic system.PloS one · 2018Article
- Mechanobiology of collective cell behaviours.Nature reviews. Molecular cell biology · 2017Review
- On-chip assay of the effect of topographical microenvironment on cell growth and cell-cell interactions during wound healing.Biomicrofluidics · 2015Article
- A Tubing-Free Microfluidic Wound Healing Assay Enabling the Quantification of Vascular Smooth Muscle Cell Migration.Scientific reports · 2015Article
- Mechanisms of epithelial wound detection.Trends in cell biology · 2015Review
- Characterization of Fibrin and Collagen Gels for Engineering Wound Healing Models.Materials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2015Article
- Bioengineering Models for Breast Cancer Research.Breast cancer : basic and clinical research · 2015Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We use a novel, microfluidics-based technique to deconstruct the classical wound healing scratch assay, decoupling the contribution of free space and cell damage on the migratory dynamics of an epithelial sheet. This method utilizes multiple laminar flows to selectively cleave cells enzymatically, and allows us to present a 'damage free' denudation. We therefore isolate the influence of free space on the onset of sheet migration. First, we observe denudation directly to measure the retraction in the cell sheet that occurs after cell-cell contact is broken, providing direct and quantitative evidence of strong tension within the sheet. We further probe the mechanical integrity of the sheet without denudation, instead using laminar flows to selectively inactivate actomyosin contractility. In both cases, retraction is observed over many cell diameters. We then extend this method and complement the enzymatic denudation with analogies to wounding, including gradients in signals associated with cell damage, such as reactive oxygen species, suspected to play a role in the induction of movement after wounding. These chemical factors are evaluated in combination with the enzymatic cleavage of cells, and are assessed for their influence on the collective migration of a non-abrasively denuded epithelial sheet. We conclude that free space alone is sufficient to induce movement, but this movement is predominantly limited to the leading edge, leaving cells further from the edge less able to move towards the wound. Surprisingly, when coupled with a gradient in ROS to simulate the chemical effects of abrasion however, motility was not restored, but further inhibited.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.