Cytometry Core Facility


  •  Location: Arizona Cancer Center, room 4920
  •  Contact: Barb Carolus, 621-2047 or the facility at 626-2450
  •  Administration: Imaging Facility, Div. of Biotechnology, Arizona Research Laboratories.
  •  Fees for Services: see the facility's list of Cytometry service fees
  •  WWW: http://cytometry.arl.arizona.edu/index.php

Reminder: SWEHSC Investigators (including their staff and students) should contact the Cellular Imaging Core directly for assistance.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

Advantages: An ideal technique for performing quantitative fluorescence measurements on a population of cells. Data can be aquired quickly, many parameters can be measured simultaneously and the cells of interest can be seperated into sub-populations. Other types of studies available include kinetics and FRET.

Disadvantages: Data is of a population of cells, users will not know which individual cell produced a particular measurement. While some sub-populations of cells can be recovered, usually the sample is analyzed and discarded. This technique measures cells, therefore intact tissues usually require pre-treatment with a enzyme to release the individual cells for analysis.

Instrument Capabilities:


The new (Sept 2004) BD Biosciences FACSAria cell sorter has three lasers (407/488/633 nm) and can detect eleven colors. It is very fast, being able to count over 30,000 events/second and sort 20,000 cells/second. It can sort four different populations of cells onto tubes of many sizes, plates, slides and culture dishes. The instrument can sort out a single cell if needed.

The following list of includes some of the measurable parameters of cells and particles using flow cytometry (list courtesy of the FACS facility) :

• Cell size/shape
• Cytoplasmic granularity
• Cell surface antigens
• Membrane integrity (viability)
• DNA content, and base ratio
• DNA degradation (apoptosis)
• Chromatin structure
• DNA synthesis
• Membrane permeability
• Membrane potential (dye/drug uptake)
• Membrane-bound/Cytoplasmic Calcium