In January Tim Bushnell, scientific and technical director of the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Flow Cytometry Core in New York State, packed a $50,000 flow cytometer in his car and drove it to a lab 15 minutes away. There, he trained beginners to use the technique—which identifies and sorts specific populations of cells—on the new benchtop machine. Just a few years ago such portability would have been unheard of: flow cytometry is generally done by teams of highly trained experts at core facilities, working on massive machines costing more than $100,000—in some cases $500,000. That is changing fast as a surge of new instrumentation is making flow cytometry easier and more affordable.
Today’s systems can be built for benchtop use and are getting ever ...
