Cell-based assays are crucial for analyzing cell health, cytotoxicity, invasion, migration, and many other biological and drug-discovery applications and cancer research. A cell invasion assay is one of many different types of assays. It measures cell movement across extracellular boundaries and how single cells respond to various chemo-attractants. This blog post will provide an overview of the critical benefits of cell invasion assays.
Category: Cell Assays
Wound healing assays measure cell migration over a two-dimensional (2D) monolayer. As cell migration takes place throughout numerous physiological processes, it has been studied in a variety of contexts from tissue injury, wound healing, cancer metastasis and more. Throughout the following post, we will explain the applications of wound healing assays and the importance of each.
Many biomedical research projects revolve around analysis of the cell. Information about cell types, cell proliferation, cell count, and cell migration is critical to advancing disease treatment and health studies. To extract this knowledge, scientists rely on various types of assays that focus on characterizing a specific property or function of target cell types. This blog post will provide a brief overview of the difference between invasion and cell migration assays, with an emphasis on cell migration assays from Platypus Technologies.
Cell culture surfaces are surfaces on which cells are grown under controlled conditions away from their natural environment. The cells under investigation are isolated from the tissue and are sustained and preserved under carefully controlled conditions.
The History of Cell Culture Surfaces
In the past century, cell culture, growth, and differentiation have moved from fringe experiments to a widely used bioproduction tool. In this time, the cell culture surfaces themselves have evolved as the research requirements adjust.
Cell migration is an extremely important cellular process. It is the directed movement of a group of cells or a single cell when responding to chemical and mechanical signals. This fundamental process takes place throughout life and continues until death, contributing to pathogenic states in disease. This article will outline the key steps of the process and how they work.
Wound healing assays are standard in vitro methods of probing collective cell migration in two dimensions. In wound healing assays, a cell-free area is formed in a confluent monolayer using physical exclusion or taking away the cells from the area via thermal, chemical, or mechanical damage. It is exposure to this cell-free area that leads to cells migrating into the gap.
Developing a new medicine and bringing it to market is a long, difficult and expensive process. This process begins with drug discovery: the unearthing of promising compounds which demonstrate some beneficial biological effect. Compound screening is the primary method by which initial drug discovery is carried out.
A research article from China Medical University investigated how a long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) known as HOTAIR contributes to the development of endometriosis.
Cell migration assays allow scientists and researchers to measure cell migration patterns. Platypus Technologies Oris Pro cell migration assays support many different cell types with extracellular matrix coated wells. In addition, Oris stoppers can be used to create cell free detection zones.
In a new research study from Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan, scientist investigated the influence of chronic inflammation on infectious phenotypes encountered with ulcerative colitis (UC), a disease of the bowels.
Cell migration is an extremely complex phenomenon. A motile single cell, or multicell aggregate, that penetrates through the extracellular matrix of neighboring tissues can be described as invasive. Cells grouped into coherent sheets, strands, or tubes may undergo a form of collective cell migration governed by tight intercellular connections. The former mechanism is characteristic of metastatic growth, while the latter is associated with wound healing. How can seemingly similar cellular mechanisms result in such dramatically different outcomes?
Platypus Technologies is a fast-growing provider of cell migration assays for precise and reproducible experimentation, from academia to the pharmaceutical sector. Our core competency revolves around the cell exclusion zone technology, an innovative, high-throughput cellular assay with real-time monitoring capabilities, and negligible margins of error. This represents a significant step forward for researchers in various clinical fields.
Dynamic cellular migration is of interest to biochemists in various areas of research and development (R&D). This process refers to the movement of individual cells or cellular clusters from one location to another, typically in response to some chemical or mechanical signal. Pharmaceutical companies have been particularly invested in studying cell migration and invasion as these processes underlie an extremely wide range of pathological phenomena – thus offering significant promise for generating valuable pharmacological interventions.
Understanding cellular invasion and migration is important for studying a wide range of biological processes. By observing the directed rate of movement of cells in response to chemical or mechanical signals, researchers can investigate processes as varied as metastasis and wound healing. Historically, this has proven difficult due to a lack of efficient and reproducible methods for quantitatively assessing cell migration.
Cellular migration refers to the movement of cells from one location to another, usually in response to some chemical or mechanical signal. It is fundamental to an extremely wide range of organic processes, from the developmental (i.e. embryogenesis) to ongoing biological maintenance (i.e. tissue repair). Using a cell migration assay, it is possible to measure the net migration and rate of migration for cellular populations in vitro and thus gain an understanding of various bioorganic mechanisms.
Cell invasion across the basement membrane is an important step in cancer metastasis. In this blog, we discuss cell invasion assays and their application for cancer research. Metastasis occurs when cancer cells pass through the basement membrane of the organ where they originated, and subsequently spread into different organs of the body, where they form secondary tumors [1].
Cell migration is integral to many physiological processes, including embryonic development, tissue regeneration, and wound healing. In addition, cell migration is involved in tumor metastasis and atherosclerosis.[1] One assay commonly used to study cell migration in vitro is the scratch assay. The scratch assay is performed by creating a cell-free gap, or “scratch”, on a confluent cell monolayer upon which cells at the edge of the opening move inward to close the scratch. Cell migration can be assessed by comparing images captured at the onset of the scratch creation and at user-defined intervals during scratch closure. The scratch assay is straightforward to perform and is inexpensive. However, methods for creating the scratch vary from lab to lab and results can be highly variable. Furthermore, the process of scratch formation has been shown to damage the underlying extracellular matrix (ECM).[2]
This application note describes a method to measure cell migration, using ImageJ, by counting the number of cells that have migrated into the Detection Zone in an Oris™ Cell Migration Assay. ImageJ is a freeware image analysis program developed at the National Institutes of Health (https://imagej.nih.gov/ij/).
Experiments show that surface coatings play an important role in cell movement
When performing cell migration experiments, a perennial question is: what surface coatings should be used to culture a particular cell type? Scientists working in Cancer Research, Wound Healing, or Drug Discovery utilize cell cultures to make important experiments and advance our understanding of biological mechanisms. In particular, assays for cell migration enable characterization of conditions and substances that influence movement of cells. For example, scientists using the OrisTM Cell Migration Assays successfully identified proteins, mRNA and antioxidants that inhibit migration of tumor cells.
Platypus Technologies introduces new surfaces for Oris™ Cell Migration Assays: Poly-L-lysine and basement membrane extract.