Factors To Consider When Selecting Flow Cytometry Services San Diego

By Mark Patterson


Flow cytometry is a procedure used to identify and measure the physical and chemical characteristics of cells or particles. One has to suspend the fluid with the particles in a particular fluid, inject it to a flow cylinder and pass through a laser beam. This process is typical in research and clinical laboratories. Here are factors to consider when selecting flow cytometry services San Diego.

Consider the exact service that you need. Flow cytometry has different fields that one can focus on. You need to acquaint with the area that you have interest in to get an expert who has specialization in it. Some of the services that one can get include counting cells, sorting cells, protein engineering detection, and diagnosis of disorders such as blood cancer.

Get different laboratories to compare. You need to compare different service providers to reach out to an ideal choice. Inquire for options from friends and relatives who are familiar with this kind of service. The internet is also a perfect source of information that one can rely on. Use the options that you get to narrow down to a couple which you can evaluate within a reasonable duration.

Evaluate all the choices that you have. You need to consider various factors to determine whether a particular laboratory meets your expectations. Start by checking whether it has a state of the art cytometer instrument. Besides that, check whether it has a reputation of offering timely services and whether it has accreditation from a relevant authority. You should also check whether the laboratory experts are reliable enough.

Consider the plans required before the experiment. One has to consider some plans to succeed in the research. Some of these plans are having a hypothesis at hand, getting the manual, and preparing the reagents needed for the procedure. Besides that, consider the possibility of change in cellular structure and find various components that can interfere with the process.

Prepare your cells. Your cell preparation depends on the research you have at hand. However, there are various preparation tips for most sample types. They include cell culturing, using an anti-coagulant to prepare blood for the analysis, and homogenizing solid organs by adding enzymatic digestions. For bone marrow cells, one should remove all muscles and tissues since they can clog the cytometer flow.

Acquaint with various measures required to control the experiment. You need to adopt different control measures to achieve excellent outcomes. Considering these measures helps in getting both positive and negative results. One can adopt control measures such as unstaining, single staining, and full stimulation. Full stimulation is common in identifying cell populations.

Check the data analysis process. You can adopt different methods to analyze your data. These measures include compensation, gating, and computer analysis. The compensation process involves correcting multi-parameter data for spectral overlap. Gating consists the use of histograms in two or three dimensions and separating the sequence using a subset extraction. Computation analysis offers a more advanced and detailed method which is better than gating.




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