>About the Caltech microfluidic sorter (Fu AY et al, Nature Biotechnology >17:1109, November, 1999) Keith Bahjat comments: >And you think your sorts take a long time now!! Imagine if your sample rate >was determined by capillary action. > >I guess for $25K, you can just buy 20 of them and use them all together, >right?? And where does it save the listmode data?? :-) Well, yeah, this is closer to NoFlo than to MoFlo, but it wasn't intended for high speed sorting. A major application is DNA fragment sizing, along the lines of what has been done at Los Alamos for some years; the instrument built by Steve Quake's group at Caltech is a little more user-friendly, probably cheaper (the detector in the Los Alamos instruments costs about $4,000, and would contribute between $12,000 and $20,000 to the selling price according to conventional guidelines). And it can sort molecules. Or viruses. Or bacteria. In a disposable, closed fluidic system. About as fast as a FACSCalibur or Partec sorter, if need be. In applications to bacteria and cells, the Caltech apparatus has the advantage that the flow can be stopped and reversed; you can examine one cell repeatedly over time before deciding whether you want to sort it. And, since the system is microscope based, it would be relatively easy to combine the fluidics with analytical capability such as is found in CompuCyte's Laser Scanning Cytometer to do multiparameter sequential analysis (and sorting) of multiple cells in multiple channels. It's unfortunate that the press release focused on comparing this technology with existing cell sorters; it really extends practical cytometry in two interesting and important directions, one being analysis of smaller stuff, and the second being the combination of strong points of static cytometry and flow sorting. In the interest of full disclosure, I have been a consultant to CompuCyte, Cytomation, Mycometrix (which will commercialize the Caltech instrument), and even B-D, among others. But everybody probably guessed that. I don't mind giving free advice on the Mailing List, but I do have to make a living. -Howard
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