ACQCYTE listmode cell cycle analysis

Eric Martz (emartz@microbio.umass.edu)
Fri, 10 Feb 1995 17:18:13 -0500 (EST)

A few ideas re: your ACQCYTE listmode files. All software mentioned below
is free (except IDL). Hopefully someone else will add some ideas because I
don't have a solution.

If my program MFI doesn't read the Phoenix ACQCYTE files, I'll be happy to
make it do so if you provide me with a sample file. It would generate
ASCII listmode or histogram files (not FCS) suitable for spreadsheets.
However MFI does not do cell cycle analysis, so may be of no help.

Although Joe Trotter's WinMDI does not do cell cycle analysis, I believe
it does export listmode or histograms to ASCII. That may be better
than MFI if you need to do doublet discrimination gating, since MFI
offers only rectangular gates (WinMDI has polygonal gates). Also, it
would allow you to get areas and intensities for manually marked segments
of histograms, which might suffice for rough purposes.

Joe Trotter also offers a program TXT2FCS which will convert an ASCII file
to an FCS file. You could see whether mcycle or cytocell would like
the result (ACQCYTE -MFI-> ASCII -TXT2FCS-> FCS -> mcycle/cytocell?).

Robb Habbersett's IDLYK does a simple cell cycle analysis. It runs
only on a unix machine with a license for the IDL interpreter (>$1,000).
However, if you contact RSI (the purveyors of IDL) they will tell you who
at U Hawaii already have IDL licenses. I was able to find IDL on a Sun
here in Computer Sci, and they were willing to give me a free account.
However, IDLYK didn't run right away and I haven't spent the time to work
out the installation glitches.

As far as I have been able to find out, there is no (totally) free software
which does cell cycle/DNA analysis (yet). As far as I have been able
to ascertain, the NIH LAP program does not do cell cycle analysis.

ftp/sources:
MFI: marlin.bio.umass.edu: /pub/flowcyt/mfi.
WinMDI, TXT2FCS (included in zipped WinMDI file): flosun.salk.edu: /pub/pc.
Habbersett: robb@beatrice.lanl.gov.

In message Thu, 09 Feb 1995 16:11:22 -1000,
Wendy Jones <wjones@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu> writes:

> I'm having a file compatability problem that hopefully, someone out there
> in the net can help me with.
>
> A short time ago I had the opportunity to train in a flow lab on the
> mainland (I'm in Hawaii). During my training I ran plant nuclei stained
> with PI for DNA content analysis. The instrument was an EPICS, and
> histograms were generated using ACQCYTE software (Pheonix) on a PC. The
> files were saved in lis mode, not as histograms. NOw that I'm back home
> I'd like to do something with those files. Hence my problem. The
> available software here is mcycle or cytocell, neither of which appear
> to like my files.
> Any suggestions? (besides start over)
> The files are in FCS 1.0 format (ortho not MADS, if thats of help)
> the parameters were LFL,FL and FS.
>
> Thanks,
> Wendy
>

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CD ROM Vol 2 was produced by staff at the Purdue University Cytometry Laboratories and distributed free of charge as an educational service to the cytometry community. If you have any comments please direct them to Dr. J. Paul Robinson, Professor & Director, PUCL, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907. Phone:(317) 494-0757; FAX (317) 494-0517; Web http://www.cyto.purdue.edu EMAIL robinson@flowcyt.cyto.purdue.edu