Morphometric analysis of murine skin wound healing: Standardization of experimental procedures and impact of an advanced multitissue array technique

Morphometric data based on skin wounding offer important information for the characterization of the phenotype of transgenic mouse models. The goal of this study was the comparison of technical procedures concerning wounding, processing, and evaluation of samples in different mouse strains. The multitissue array technique was used to estimate its adaptability for standardized analysis in wound healing. Skin wounds between days 1 and 14 after wounding were analyzed. The influence of mouse strain (C57BI/6 vs. FVB/N mice), sex, size of the punch biopsies, and preparation of the tissue sections was investigated on 94 mice. The parameters distance between the migration tongues (deltaMT) and surface not covered by epithelium were evaluated to describe the reepithelialization, and the distance between the adnexa was chosen to measure wound contraction. In addition, the techniques to measure the area of granulation tissue (GT) were evaluated. The data illustrate the requirement of standardized conditions for skin wound-healing experiments and demonstrate that histological preparation in serial sections is mandatory to detect slight differences in wound contraction. For the analysis of cellular composition in GT, multitissue arrays are useful tools in wound-healing studies.