Neo Sim Yee writes: >In our work, we are dealing with bacteria of a size range as small as 0.5um. >The flow check we are currently using is the 10um Flow Check Fluorosphere >from Coulter. Noting the relatively large difference in size of the flow >check particles and the cells that we are analysing, does this introduce a >significant amount of error in the sense that the instrument may not be >optimally aligned fot the analysis of such small paticles? In my experience with flow cytometers using laser light sources (and I assume one is being used in this case), fluorescence and orthogonal scatter channels aligned using large particles do not need to be reoptimized with smaller ones for analysis of bacteria. However, I often find that the performance of the forward scatter channel can be improved if I realign using particles in the size range of 0.5 or even 0.2 um. Polysciences has a range of yellow-green fluorescent spheres which work well for such alignment purposes. -Howard
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