From: Alice L. Givan (Alice.L.Givan@Dartmouth.EDU)
Date: Tue Apr 11 1995 - 09:51:59 EST
There is a venerable article by Pinkel and Stovel in Flow Cytometry: Instrumentation and Data Analysis -- Academic Press 1985. It gives lots of helpful practical information as well as the relevant equations for model sorted sample yields and sort rates. In a perfect world where detection electronic dead time is not limiting and all sorted cells survive, sorting yield is related (in an exponential way) to flow rate, # of drops deflected, drop drive frequency , as well as to the frequency of the sorted cells. You can plot the equations for yourself and see quite nicely that % yield goes down rapidly with flow rate. If you are concerned with getting cells as quickly as possible but not worried about yield, you can see that the sort rate of the "wanted" cells increases for a while with flow rate, but reaches a maximum and then decreases as the flow rate gets still faster. Pinkel and Stovel say that "if the desired subpopulation is only a small fraction of the total, the maximum sorting rate occurs when there is an average of one particle in the sequence of n droplets to be deflected at each sort." Although this article does not take into consideration all of the practical problems that have been discussed recently, the actual results we get in sorting can't get any better than the basic limitations inherent in the flow sorting technique. My general impression is that purity is hardly ever a problem -- but yield of precious cells can be a killer. Alice Givan Englert Cell Analysis Laboratory Dartmouth Medical School Lebanon, NH 03756, USA tel: 603-650-7907 fax: 603-650-6130
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