Microfluidic Tools for Single-Cell Wound Repair Studies

Wound healing is an essential biological process for maintaining homeostasis and, ultimately, for survival. Cells, such as skeletal muscles, are wounded regularly under physiological conditions. Understanding wound response at the single-cell level is critical for determining fundamental cellular functions needed for cell repair and survival, and ultimately, how wound-induced diseases such as muscular dystrophies develop. Key barriers to answering these questions are the lack of a tool that can introduce wounds reproducibly to a large number of cells and a quantitative assay to measure healing efficiency. We aim to develop a microfluidic platform to investigate the mechanisms underlying single-cell wound healing using Stentor coeruleus as a model organism.