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| FloCyte Regionals: A Gateway to the World of Flow |
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Sunny Davis, California was the site of the latest FloCyte Regional Intensive Short Course in Flow Cytometry. This course is designed to provide the background, theory and hands-on training necessary to put scientists from all walks in the driver's seat of their own flow experiements. These courses are ongoing and may be in your area soon. If you are thinking about signing up, and want a user's perspective of a week in the life of a FloCyte attendee, then read more...
The Davis course is taught by Carol Oxford, the manager of Davis' Opticore facility. Carol and her crack technician, Bridget McLaughlin, provided overviews of theory and hands-on application throughout the week. In addition, guest lectures by well-known flow scientists such as Nicole Baumgarth, Holden Maecker, Marty Bigos and Jan Nolta put the science of flow in perspective and gave attendees insight into what the future holds for flow and experiemental designs and methods that are taking flow to new levels. The five-day course is divided daily between lecture and labs. After ingesting four hours of material on everything from optics to FMOs to rare event detection, we'd break for lunch. Upon revitalization, attendees would move upstairs to the Opticore for peaks into the guts of many instruments at UC Davis' disposal. In addition to the standard labs that provided step-by-step walk-throughs of UC Davis' custom configured MoFlo and LSR II, presentations were given by industry reps from Perkin-Elmer, Beckman-Coulter and Accuri. Perkin-Elmer provided a look at their new HCS image system, Opera, along with an introduction to its associated software analysis platform Acapella. Acapella has a unique libaray of custom scripts that can be user generated for a specific analysis design, with more added every day. Beckman-Coulter was there to showcase the Quanta, their desktop-sized 3-color+ cytometer, and Ted from Accuri opened the hood on their C6 to give and up-close and personal look at the solid state lasers that provide that machine with great interrogation power at a fraction of the bench space and cost of many other intstruments. I was pleasantly surprised at the enthusiasm of all the reps and the sense of community that all of them brought to the table. The highlight of the trip for me, aside from sampling from an array of Davis' upscale restaurants and meeting many UCD scientists, had to be the lecture given by Holden Maecker. Dr. Maeker's lecture centered around the six main steps that should be utilized for successful multicolor flow. His expertise has been utilized by BD to ensure top quality results and his methods are akin to those outlined by other giants in the field such as Mario Roederer. We can always gain from ensuring proper quality control at every step, from instrument configuration to data analysis, and Holden provided clear and concise methods to further the goal of perfect QC. By the time pictures were taken and certificates of completion were handed out, words like spread and compensation had become vernacular and the thought of performing compensation by eye made me shudder and cringe. In otherwords, it was worth it. If you are interested in learning more about FloCyte trainings, visit their website or contact their president, Susan DeMaggio here. If you would like a look at Dr. Maecker's contribution to the flow field, go here. |
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