Commercial high speed machines open new opportunities in high throughput flow cytometry (HTFC)

Two recent events have opened a new domain of flow cytometry applications which we term high throughput flow cytometry (HTFC). The release of a commercial high speed sorter in 1994 placed HTFC within the reach of anyone who could buy one of the new machines and not just the handful of advanced laboratories worldwide that had custom built their own high speed sorters. The advent in 1999 of HTFC analysis capabilities of 100000 cells/s marks the second stage in this enabling of HTFC. We describe the technical basis of HTFC. The commercial high speed sorters measure cells in dead-times three to six times shorter than conventional machines. They can sort with high yield and high purity at rates from 25000 to 60000 cells/s, depending on their settings, mainly by virtue of their use of high drop creation rates 100000 drops/s or more. Finally, one series can analyse the measured cells at rates exceeding these sort-rates and at least six times faster than conventional sorters could. The performance of the systems made by the three manufacturers can be readily assessed for single laser systems. Comparison becomes difficult for multiple beam machines, due to requirements for multi-beam sampling for each cell and due to the demands of fluorescence compensation between signals from one laser and between signals from two or three lasers. Applications are described in the field of rare cell analysis and isolation as well as from sorting of abundant cell populations.