Flow Cytometry Core Facility
Facility Overview
The Flow Cytometry Facility, located at UMass Medical School in Worcester, provides a wide variety of cytometry services for internal and external investigators with state-of-the-art sorting and analyzing capabilities. We currently have three FACSCaliburs, a 4 laser LSRII, a 5 laser LSRII, a 3 laser Beckman Coulter MoFlo XDP hi-speed cell sorter, an all digital 3 laser 11 color FACSVantage DE DiVa sorter, a 19 parameter, 5 laser FACSAria, and a 14 parameter, 4 laser FACSAria dedicated to BSL3 cell sorting. One LSR II and one Calibur are dedicated for customer use, after training, which we can provide.
What is flow cytometry?
Cytometry is the measurement of physical/chemical characteristics of cells or other biological particles. In flow cytometry, these measurements are made as cells in fluid suspension pass, one by one, through a measurement apparatus, the flow cytometer. Flow cytometry is performed on single cell suspensions and is not appropriate for analysis of cell clumps. Flow cytometry provides discrete measurements from each cell in the sample. This provides a distribution rather than an average of the measured characteristics in the cell sample.
Why use flow cytometry?
- Thousands to millions of cells can be analyzed in a short period of time.
- Statistical information very quickly.
- Flexibility in the acquisition of data.
- Ability to reanalyze archived data.
- Increased sensitivity and specificity
- Separate up to four target populations simultaneously.
Flow Cytometry allows the simultaneous measurement of:
Relative Cell Size
Internal Cellular Complexity
Relative Fluorescence Intensity
Multiple color/parameter analysis (up to 19 color, 21 parameter)