Matrigel Coating

We're using cell culture inserts that are about the size of a well in a 96-well plate, and coat them with Matrigel. We have a probelm of uneven coating, which I suspect has a lot to do with the small size of the well and the fluid dynamics in such a small area. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make the coatings more consistent and even? Right now we use consistent volumes and dilutions, and coat for consistent periods of time. Thanks for any recommendations.

Matrigel solidify really quick, freeze pipet tips, keep the bottle on ice, place 96well plate on the cold block. When you prep the gell smaller space it's harder to have consistent result, I guess it's because of surface tension as matrigle is much 'stickier' than liquid culture medium.

 Well, have read ths ? --->  http://www.chem.ucla.edu/dept/Faculty/gimzewski/publications/211_2008_Langmuir.pdf
you should have a look on this....

Thank you alexpennos for reference. But my experience with matrigel on small culture area, still surface tension has more significant effect. And it seems there's not a thing we can do about uneven mechanical stress....=(

As you might read..is very difficult to measure and ofcourse to understand and predict surface dynamics in such small amounts of materials... :( Stresses in such a tiny level are very in-comparable to mechanical stress induced by ways of measurement. 
A good way to predict and manipulate the scheme of the coating, is to place it in a non-aqueous solution (maybe an oil). Think about it...when you throw oil into water, oil forms a shape that has the minimum possible surface...that's because oil hates water...

I believe you must be very familiar with mechanotransduction study. A member of my committee recently hosted a seminar on mechanotransduction and the speaker showed the thickness of matrix determine mechanical stress from hard surface material. Researchers in mechanotransduction study already found striking difference in cell shape/skeleton/protein expression etc. between floating gel and matrix on hard surface. Definitely it's worthy to try your method when mechanical stress must be in consideration.
I know there's quite a few reference on mechanical stress measured in various tissues. It'd also be good to refer them before plan experiments. =)

I used to do collagen coating of Transwells but was using the larger 12 well formats so didn't really have this problem. When I do matrigel coating of normal wells and flasks, I use a very thin layer of matrigel as it is quite expensive. You should be able to reduce the effect that surface tension has on your 96wp insert coatings by increasing the volume you use per well. Surface tension will always give you a slighly greater depth around the perimeter of the well, but with a larger starting volume, this increaced depth will be proportionally less. You could also reduce the concentration of matrigel and leave it longer (I do 2 hours at RT). 

We have matrigel stocks aliquoted and frozen. Before use, we place a vial of matrigel at 4 degrees for about 2 hours to thaw very slowly, before adding medium to it to dilute it to the required concentration. Not doing the slow thaw can result in a heterogeneous solution and perhaps an uneven coating.

We used to coat   6 well plates with matrigel after diluting with stem cells media approximately in 1: 30 ratio. As mentioned in other blogs we used to aliquot and thaw the matrigel slowly at 4degree before coating the wells.
Biju