Building a flow cytometry panel or need some guidance on your experiment? BioLegend has over a dozen tools to help you choose the right reagents. Learn about the spectral properties of new fluorophores, find tools to help select antibodies, and receive guidance on troubleshooting and experimental setup. Check out these web tools to prepare the ideal flow cytometry experiment.
Conventional Spectra Analyzer
“Conventional/traditional” flow cytometers use a series of mirrors and filters in order to capture the emission wavelengths from excited fluorophores. Fluors that have emission profiles that fall into the same filter cannot be separated or identified from one another.
Biolegends spectra analyzer can display the excitation and emission spectra for dozens of fluorophores. This allows you to compare the excitation and emission profiles of fluors, custom filters, and laser lines to see what best fits your cytometer.
Spectral Cytometry Analyzer
Spectral cytometers capture the full spectrophotometric profile of the fluorophores across all lasers. The fluors’ profiles are captured in 10-30 nm segments across the emission range to accurately unmix the fluorophores. This allows fluors that normally cannot be unmixed on a conventional cytometer (e.g. Pacific Blue™ and Brilliant Violet 421™) to be used together on an instrument like Cytek’s Aurora.
As such, this web tool is dedicated to displaying the emission spectra of fluorophores based on Cytek’s Aurora spectral cytometers.
A comparison of channels that might typically be used for the violet laser on a spectral cytometer (top) compared to filters on a conventional cytometer (bottom). The added “side-by-side” channels on a spectral cytometer allow spectrally similar fluors to be unmixed depending on how their emission profiles look in other channels (including the ones available on additional lasers). On a conventional cytometer, a fluor’s main ‘peak’ or emission is mainly captured in one filter set, making it harder to distinguish spectrally similar fluors.
Do you want to learn more about Flow Cytometry Web Tools? Get in contact with our product specialists for guidance here.
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