Impedance spectroscopy applied to the fast wounding dynamics of an electrical woundhealing assay in mammalian cells

BELLOTTI, MARIELA; FABIAN GIANA; BONETTO, FABIAN.J.

MEASUREMENT SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (PRINT)

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2015 vol. 26 p. 1 - 11

0957-0233

AbstractElectrical wound-healing assays are often used as a means to study in vitro cell migration andproliferation. In such analysis, a cell monolayer that sits on a small electrode is electricallywounded and its spectral impedance is then continuously measured in order to monitor thehealing process. The relatively slow dynamics of the cell healing have been extensivelystudied, while those of the much faster wounding phase have not yet been investigated. Ananalysis of the electrical properties of a particular cell type during this phase could giveextra information about the changes in the cell membrane due to the application of thewounding current, and could also be useful to optimize the wounding regime for different celltypes. The main issue when trying to register information about these dynamics is that thetraditional measurement scheme employed in typical wound-healing assays doesn?t allow thesimultaneous application of the wounding signal and measurement of the system?s impedance.In this paper, we overcome this limitation by implementing a measurement strategy consistingof cycles of fast alternating low- and high-voltage signals applied on electrodes covered withmammalian cells. This approach is capable of registering the fast impedance changes duringthe transient regime corresponding to the cell wounding process. Furthermore, these quasisimultaneoushigh- and low-voltage measurements can be compared in order to obtain anempirical correlation between both quantities.