An intriguing set-up! Just want to know if the sandwiched gels...

Thank you for the comment. When it comes to artificial stress, any in vitro setup would have a degree of artificial stress on the cells but here in this protocol, we made sure this is very minimal. In our observation, over 3 days cells were active and dividing. As well there were no drastic morphological changes. These were an indicator that in our setup, cells were not stressed and performing the intended migration.