  Wound healing assays are commonly used to study how populations of cells,
initialised on a two-dimensional surface, act to close an artificial wound
space. While real wounds have different shapes, standard wound healing assays
often deal with just one simple wound shape, and it is unclear whether varying
the wound shape might impact how we interpret results from these experiments.
In this work, we describe a new kind of wound healing assay, called a sticker
assay, that allows us to examine the role of wound shape in a series of wound
healing assays performed with fibroblast cells. In particular, we show how to
use the sticker assay to examine wound healing with square, circular and
triangular shaped wounds. We take a standard approach and report measurements
of the size of the wound as a function of time. This shows that the rate of
wound closure depends on the initial wound shape. This result is interesting
because the only aspect of the assay that we change is the initial wound shape,
and the reason for the different rate of wound closure is unclear. To provide
more insight into the experimental observations we describe our results
quantitatively by calibrating a mathematical model, describing the relevant
transport phenomena, to match our experimental data. Overall, our results
suggest that the rates of cell motility and cell proliferation from different
initial wound shapes are approximately the same, implying that the differences
we observe in the wound closure rate are consistent with a fairly typical
mathematical model of wound healing. Our results imply that parameter estimates
obtained from an experiment performed with one particular wound shape could be
used to describe an experiment performed with a different shape. This
fundamental result is important because this assumption is often invoked, but
never tested.
