High-speed cell sorting

Abstract

A flow cytometer has the ability to analyze several thousand cells per second. This is particularly valuable for the detection of rare events. For many biological and clinical applications, cells must be isolated on the basis of multiple quantitative properties. This need is ideally met by the analytical power of flow cytometry, which provides the front-end selection mechanism for cell sorting. In essence, cell sorting represents real-time data classification coupled with actual physical isolation of cells with the properties of interest. This unit discusses the principles and practices of operating a cell sorter to maximize the sorting rate, including the trade-offs between speed and resolution.