Applications

There is a multitude of applications for flow cytometric analyses in biology reaching from classical immunological and cell biological approaches to experiments determining ecological contexts. Eukaryotic cells, protozoans, bacteria or even some viruses can be detected as well as other particles with a size up to 50 µm and not smaller than 200 nm in combination with a fluorescence parameter. Up to 18 fluorophores can be detected simultaneously. This gives opportunities not only to researchers of biological fields, not typically using flow cytometry, but also to approaches coming from chemistry or physics.

Applications already used in our facility are listed below, but we are open for requests regarding new methodologies (flowkon@uni-konstanz.de):

• Live/dead discrimination
• Apoptosis assays (PI/Annexin, Viability dyes)
• Immunophenotyping
• Cell cycle /proliferation (BrdU, CFSE)
• Protein phosphorylation in whole cells
• Calcium flux assays
• Reporter gene expression
• Transfection efficiency
• Cell or particle counting