Fluorescence technologies with flow cytometry have been used in the clinical sciences for many purposes since it has been established method. This is standardized for clinical analysis but also for other research based applications. It however suffers from one limitation that it is limited to 20 independent channels and is very complex to setup 20 channels. It is much simpler to setup 4—10 channels that is used by most people.
DVS Sciences had come up with CyTOF that enabled the labeling of cells with heavy metal labels that could be used to analyze the cells for individual proteins/markers. However, when multiplexing multiple markers there is a need to generate specific codes that label each condition and enable samples to be run in parallel.
Nolan’s group has created these barcodes and this information is also available at Cytobank (a repository of flow cytometry information) and also published in Nature Biotechnology.
This great framework of data representation (look at Figure 5) and amounts of data show that it is possible to collect multiple parameters per cell treated with different inhibitors at different concentrations and publish as a plot that can be visualized quickly.
This technology can thus be also used to analyze complex stem cells from different lineages and understand its differentiation.