How Flow Cytometers Work — and Don’t Work

Abstract

If you’re new to flow cytometry, and/or use one of the modern benchtop flow cytometers which don’t require, or even allow, you to mess with the guts of the instrument, you may not care much about how flow cytometers work. A lot of highly competent molecular biologists, immunologists, etc., look at the flow cytometer as a tool, and just want to see samples go in and pretty pictures and numbers come out. This works remarkably well if you’re doing the same analyses and analyzing the same samples as everybody else is, but, sooner, or later, you may want to do something new and different, and knowing some of the inner details will almost certainly help you design better experiments which will get you the most information for the least effort. you won’t get many of the details from these few pages, but I’ll try to point you in the right direction; I have written about the subject at much greater length, if you’re interested in pursuing things further.