Flow Cytometer

Imperial College donated a Flow Cytometer. It was donated as working, but in need of repair. However there is a lot of damage due to corrosion, which might be impossible to fix for a reasonable amount of time and money.

Status: It's sustained damage to the sampling area, and we are missing some bits. Repairing is likely to be very $$$, so we are planning to dismantle it and use the optics and lasers on other projects.

Status: The machine was too expensive to repair, and was too large to store and therefore has been scrapped. Several of the parts have been incorporated into other projects, or have been ebayed.

The unit is too large to be stored in the biolab (1.8m X 0.8m = 1.44 square meters of floor space) and was previously moved to storage while we worked on it.

There are a number of large external units some of which are for providing power and cooling to the large laser.

There is a good description of how a flow cytometer works here; http://media.invitrogen.com.edgesuite.net/tutorials/4Intro_Flow/player.html

The machine requires a dust free environment due to it's use of lasers and optics.

I am currently looking to obtain a copy of the service manual.

Educationz

Harvard University extension school course on microfluidics, course notes

http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k41912&pageid=icb.page213804

Caltech course notes on microfluidics

http://thesis.library.caltech.edu/4796/3/02_Chapter_2.pdf

Cornell book on microfluidics

http://www.kirbyresearch.com/index.cfm/wrap/textbook/microfluidicsnanofluidics.html

Flow cytometry tutorial

This is a AV presentation describing the basics of the technology;

http://media.invitrogen.com.edgesuite.net/tutorials/4Intro_Flow/player.html

Practical Flow cytometry

This is an online version of the bible of Flow cytometry (Shapiro 2003)

http://www.coulterflow.com/bciflow/practical/book/index.html

Dako - flow cytometry

http://www.dako.com/08065_15dec05_guide_to_flow_cytometry.pdf

Microfluidics Links

Introduction to fluidics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1waCEPpWPI