After spending the last few weeks of lab with fluorescence spectroscopy, I was reminded of an equipment I have used previously in the lab I used to work in, called flow cytometry. This piece of equipment can be used for cell counting, cell sorting, and biomarker detection. The beauty of it lies in its ability to simultaneously provide multi parametric analysis very quickly. I used this machine in the context of trying to identify surface markers that are commonly found in leukemic cells. So how exactly does flow cytometry work its wonders?
It turns out that flow cytometry is based on fluorescence. For example, one has to use fluorophores as labels to attach to an antibody that recognizes a target feature of the cell. Each fluorophore has a characteristic peak of excitation and emission wavelength. The fluorophores attached to cells are excited by laser and the emission spectra is collected, and using such data, a very specific set of cells can be gated and analyzed because of the specific flurophores that had been used.