Archive for August, 2011
Future Proofing Your Experiments and Files: The Importance of Annotation
Ever find yourself staring at a folder of FCS files and thinking, “Wait, now which tubes did I add PMA to, how much did I add, and which samples were these again?”
Jonathan from Cytobank/Stanford recommends what he calls “future proofing” in order to avoid this problem. He explained this approach during a CYTO 2011 Pre-Congress course in his talk titled “Flood Cytometry: Embracing Single Cell Systems Biology (and coping with large cytometry experiments).” In that talk, he outlined four easy steps that are useful for experiments of all sizes.
When collecting on the cytometer:
- Tag your FCS files with key experiment details (e.g. “Patient-J01 IL-2 15m”)
- Label the channels you are measuring (before collecting data)
- Make sure scales and compensations work (before collecting data)
- Encode clinical sample IDs (don’t use HIPAA sensitive information)
Click the image to download as a PPT slide
Customized Sharing Using Cytobank Projects
Because Cytobank is web-based, we can help you share your flow data with your advisor, labmates, and collaborators – all around the world! By default, your data is private and visible only to you, but if you do decide to share, the easiest way to share an experiment is to give another user full access. But what if you need to share dozens of experiments with the same three people? Or what if you don’t want to give full access to someone but still want them to see your Illustrations?
A Cytobank project enables you to share multiple experiments with the same group of people. A project also allows you to set project-wide permission levels that let you determine whether or not people can make new illustrations and whether or not they can clone the experiments contained within the project.
