>Hi Greg > >Students and indeed investigators new to analysing and interpreting >list-mode data shouldn't dismiss the expertise of experienced operators >offhand. Gating data is a powerful tool. I would start though with a simple >package like Cellquest for the mac. Almost everyone I have talked to has >found Flow JO not very intuitive and don't care to use it, myself >included.I also felt it ran very sluggishly on a Powermac-maybe it does >better on a G3. > > > > >Marcia Woda >Manager, FACS Shared Instrument Facility >Univ. of Mass Medical School >Worcester, Ma. 01655 My experience on these points is quite different... My personal experience is that FlowJo gating is very intutitive and logical - but not necessarily if you have been trained on programs that use other gating logic (eg CellQuest). It can be quite a challenge to move over if you are used to other schemes, but I'm not sure a person new to flow would find it so difficult (I'm testing this hypothesis at the moment - we have two people new to flow is lab - one is learning CellQuest and the other FlowJo...) As to the speed of running - when the files are local (ie on your hard disk) the total time taken to do a basic analysis of an experiment is very similar between CellQuest and FlowJo (I tried both in parallel when we first evaluated FlowJo). To me FlowJo certainly didn't feel anymore "sluggish" on the 7300/180 I was using (although this was with an old version - the new version of FlowJo has a new live layout editor that can slow things down, but you don't have to use it, it is just new functionality that is useful if you have the machine to handle it). When the files are on the network it is more complicated but most of the time I think FlowJo would be faster. In the long term I have found FlowJo an immense time-saver over CellQuest - all my analyses are recorded and I can go back to them and modify them easily. I can save stats in a useful form (this alone has saved me hours) and making pictures for publication or presentation is at least an order of magnitude better than CellQuest (especially if you don't have room to store all your files locally and have to fetch them out of an archive). The other major advantage of FlowJo is you can get a trial version - no such beast exists for CellQuest (at least not that I know of). You actually have to buy the package to try it out. If you are planning to do a lot of flow work think about your analysis package very carefully. CellQuest is perfectly adequate and does a good job but I personally think FlowJo is a much better, but obviously some people diasgree. (there was one lab here that tried FlowJo and then sent it back because they didn't like it - mainly because it didn't have some abilities they needed - it now has those abilities). Good Luck, Adrian
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