The GFP can be detected but only under fluorescent microscope. Most of the time you just take a look or a picture under faze-contrast microscope to analyze the wound healing. Also, your GFP signal will depend on how many cells got transfected. You do not provide enough of details about your experiment for me to give you more specific answer... Why do you want to use the EGFP? Are you going to use empty vector or is the EGFP tagged to some other protein?
Hi Robert, I have my protein of interest tagged with EGFP, and it is known to be involved in cell migration process. So if I have a situation where I want to compare the ability of my wild type protein verses mutant protein using wound healing assay under microscopy. Is it worth to get a decent idea by observing GFP signal at the scratch site ?!!
I assume that you would want to transfect cells with either your wild type, or mutant-GFP construct, scrape a wound and observe if the GFP transfected cells are moving faster. Am I right? The experiment is doable but if you would want to do any statistics you will have to accommodate for the number of transfected cells and repeat the experiment at least 3 times. Another variation for the cell motility experiment is checking cell migration through the transwell. In short, you seed your transfected cells on to a plastic mesh that is submerged in a culture dish well. Next you check how many cells migrated through the mesh to the bottom of the well. However, you will need to know how many GFP positive cells you started with. The wound assay could be easier, but the transwell assay is more quantitative...
As for the detection of GFP-tegged proteins, you can do that in both live or fixed cells.