Tools to Improve Your Panel Design – Determining Antigen Density
By: Tim Bushnell, PhD
When a researcher chooses to use flow cytometry to answer a scientific question, they first have to build a polychromatic panel that will take advantage of the power of the technology and experimental design. When we set up to use flow cytometry to answer a scientific question, we have to design a polychromatic panel that will allow us to identify the cells of interest – the target of the research. To identify these cells, we need to build a panel that takes advantage of the relative brightness of the fluorochromes, the expression level of the different proteins on the cell,…
The Essential Dos and Don'ts of NGS (Next Generation Sequencing)
By: Deepak Kumar, PhD
Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is a rapidly evolving and widely used method worldwide in both academic and non-academic settings. One of the most valuable aspects of NGS is producing millions of sequenced reads with diverse read lengths from small amounts of input DNA. NGS methods are extremely versatile; producing reads as short as 75 bp, as seen in SOLiD sequencing, to long reads ranging upwards of 1000bp in the case of Pyrosequencing. Both long and short reads fill a unique niche for researchers. Longer reads generated from NGS are excellent for genomic rearrangement and genome assembly projects; especially when there…