Facility overview

The UNC Flow Cytometry Facility provides state-of-the-art flow cytometry and related services to the entire UNC-CH research community as well as to others in the Research Triangle Park area. A skilled staff provides help with instrument setup, data analysis, and consultation for experiment design. Training is available to enable investigators and their staff to run the analytical cytometers themselves at reduced cost. A major part of our mission is to teach this technology to investigators, students, and staff. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about flow cytometry, if you want to know if you can use it in your research, how to design experiments, prepare samples, or how to analyze your data. The core is located in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology, on the 6th floor of the Mary Ellen Jones Building, 116 Manning Drive, Chapel Hill, NC.

Instrumentation

Did you know?

High Throughput sample screening can be done on our LSR II! There is a 96-well HTS unit that will let you run 96 samples at a time without having to change a tube! Diva software allows you to pre-program well contents for efficient data analysis. This is a real time saver for any flow cytometry experiment with lots of tubes to run.

The Flow Cytometry Core Facility hosts a number of analysis software options including specialty software on our Analysis computer in room 618 MEJB and access to our FlowJo site license. See our web page https://www.med.unc.edu/flowcytometry/software-for-acquisition-and-analysis/available-software or ask our staff for more information!

Updated Compensation tips on our webpage: http://www.med.unc.edu/flowcytometry/basic-flow-cytometry/compensation. See also the FlowJo 'Daily Dongle' http://flowjo.typepad.com/the_daily_dongle/2011/09/index.html for FlowJo- specific instructions.

Summit training: compensation and panel design - we are continuing our training extension to help work through your questions. These will be one-on-one sessions at the CyAn. You can have some of your data available for analysis with our staff to help you perform the most optimal compensation, learn best practices for building your compensation panel and how to increase sensitivity through optimizing your panel design.  Please notify Barry Udis to sign up: barry_udis@med.unc.edu or call 6-1530.   LSR II users may request similar training on the LSR II with Diva.

New to sorting? See our updated Sorting Tips: A Guide for Investigators, with detailed information that you should know while planning your sorting experiment and communicating with our staff.

Are you planning on publishing your Flow Cytometry Data? New publication requirements are coming (or are already enforced) for many high impact journals. For a description of MIFlowCyt - 'Minimum Information for Flow Cytometry experiments', view this link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cyto.a.20623/pdf For now, see our link under 'Application Protocols' for instructions on running Calibration Beads.

The UNC Flow Cytometry Core Facility is supported in part by an NCI Center Core Support Grant (P30CA06086) to the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.