


Hopefully, you will objectively choose the right events to display. In other words, you can reuse and refine your gates and plots over and over again without actually losing cells, but you and you alone will determine which events you are displaying. While actual cells will not be lost in trying various gating strategies, data points can be eliminated from your population. 5 Gating Strategies For Publishing Flow Cytometry Data This is also where science becomes an art form.

Thankfully, there are many ways to avoid shaping the results, and instead sifting for the real and actual data that is relevant to the flow cytometry experiment at hand.Ĭommunicating the results of a flow cytometry experiment is where the researcher has the power to make new or subtle findings instantly comprehensible to the audience. Science must be objective, or it is simply an exercise in creative sculpting, which does nothing to move science forward. The critical difference between sculptor and scientist is that while the sculptor is guided by a creative vision, the researcher is guided by very particular laws of nature and a specific method of working through a biological hypothesis to avoid shaping the results to his or her whims. There is a story inside the data, and it is the job of the researcher to unravel it. When sitting down to perform a new analysis of flow cytometry data, it is much like Michelangelo staring at a piece of marble. “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” - Michelangelo
