All You Need To Know If You Are You Beginning A Flow Cytometry Job?

Flow Cytometry actually started as a simple device intended during WWII to identify bacteria in defense against germ warfare. Today, people use flow cytometry to analyze cells and their kinetics, tumors, and the cellular DNA content in a person. Flow Cytometry works by giving us the wonderful capability to measure fluorescence and scatter factors of individual cells.

What a flow cytometer does is use lasers to scatter light from particles such as chromosomes, bacteria, cells, etc, and set off fluorescent dyes attached to molecules. In order to work in the field of flow cytometry you must have a lot of knowledge and schooling. Flow cytometry is used in the medical field mostly for the diagnosis of health disorders such as cancers in the blood, however it also has many uses in common research and many other medical practices. How it works is, a beam of light of one single wavelength is directed onto a stream of fluid, a number of detectors are intended at the point where the stream is passing through the light beam; one is in line with the light beam, and several are perpendicular to it, with fluorescent detectors. Each particle passing through the beam will in some way scatter the light, and the fluorescent chemicals found in the particle will emit light at a longer wavelength than the source of the light.

The detectors pick up the combination of fluorescent light and scattered light. It is possible then to obtain different information about the chemical and physical structure of each particle. It is very complicated to understand and comprehend how the system works, this is why in order to be a cytometrist you must be very knowledgeable in the field. Today, cytometers are able to examine thousands of particles every second, and can separate particles that have specified properties. A flow cytometer has five different components, a flow cell, which is a liquid stream that carries the cells so that they pass through the light beam in a single line. An optical system; most commonly used are laps, low power air-cooled lasers and high power water-cooled lasers. A detector and analogue-to-digital conversion system; which works by generating FSC and SSC as well as fluorescent signals from the light used into electrical signals that can be processed by a computer, An amplification system; which means it uses linear or logarithmic, and the last out of the five is a computer for analysis of the signals that are passed through during the process. When people use a flow cytometer, and collect data from samples, it is actually termed acquisition. Early flow cytometers were experimental devices but have advanced sufficiently over the years. Today the flow cytometers have advanced and have many lasers and fluorescent detectors, which allows for numerous antibody labeling and identifying more precisely in the research.

Remember when beginning in cytometry, there are a number of other fields to be consider such as pathology, molecular biology, plant biology, immunology, and marine biology. Cytometry is also used in these fields as well as it can be helpful especially in the field of molecular biology, so it can help to be familiar if not proficient with some information in other fields that cytometry is used.