The Department of Pathology Flow Cytometry Facility provides flow cytometric analysis and cell sorting services to investigators in the Harvard Medical School and in the Harvard affiliated hospitals and institutions. The facility currently has a FACSCalibur for assisted as well as unassisted flow cytometric acquisition and analysis, and a FACSAria for cell sorting (performed by an expert technician).

Our FACSAria is a new generation bench top flow cytometer/cell sorter; the first to incorporate a fixed alignment gel-coupled cuvette flow cell instead of the conventional jet-in-air configuration. In the current configuration, our FACSAria accommodates three solid state lasers (488, 638, and 405-nm) with a variety of filters to enable detection of up to 13 different fluorescent color parameters as well as forward scatter and side scatter. This fully digital instrument samples the data 10 million times per second with each signal digitized into one of 16,384 possible levels. This eliminates the dead time inherent to analogue systems, which are unable to process a new signal while in the midst of processing a previous signal. With this system we are capable of sorting up to rates of 30,000 cells/s, 4 populations simultaneously, and into a variety of collection devices. The FACSAria operates on a PC based Windows platform with BD FACSDiva acquisition and analysis software.

For more information on flow cytometry services please contact John Sullivan (432-6349 or john_sullivan3@hms.harvard.edu)