Logo image
Murine Excisional Wound Healing Model and Histological Morphometric Wound Analysis
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Murine Excisional Wound Healing Model and Histological Morphometric Wound Analysis

Lindsey Rhea and Martine Dunnwald
JOVE-JOURNAL OF VISUALIZED EXPERIMENTS, Vol.2020(162), pp.1-18
08/01/2020
DOI: 10.3791/61616
PMCID: PMC9280391
PMID: 32894272

View Online

Abstract

The murine excisional wound model has been used extensively to study each of the sequentially overlapping phases of wound healing: inflammation, proliferation and remodeling. Murine wounds have a histologically well-defined and easily recognizable wound bed over which these different phases of the healing process are measurable. Within the field, it is common to use an arbitrarily defined "middle" of the wound for histological analyses. However, wounds are a three-dimensional entity and often not histologically symmetrical, supporting the need for a well-defined and robust method of quantification to detect morphometric defects with a small effect size. In this protocol, we describe the procedure for creating bilateral, full-thickness excisional wounds in mice as well as a detailed instruction on how to measure morphometric parameters using an image processing program on select serial sections. The two-dimension measurements of wound length, epidermal length, epidermal area, and wound area are used in combination with the known distance between sections to extrapolate the three-dimension epidermal area covering the wound, overall wound area, epidermal volume and wound volume. Although this detailed histological analysis is more time and resource consuming than conventional analyses, its rigor increases the likelihood of detecting novel phenotypes in an inherently complex wound healing process.
Multidisciplinary Sciences Science & Technology Science & Technology - Other Topics

Details

Metrics

Logo image