John P. Nolan, Ph.D. will be presenting the webinar "Beyond Polychromatic: Spectral Flow Cytometry."  John is the Past-President of ISAC and he is currently a Professor at the La Jolla Bioengineering Institute/The Scintillon Institute in San Diego, CA.

Since the earliest days of flow cytometry, researchers have sought to bring the spectral resolution of a fluorescence spectrometer to the analysis of individual cells in flow, but faced many limitations in optics, detectors, and electronics that made this impractical. Today, these limitations have been largely overcome and it is possible to collect the full fluorescence emission spectra of individual cells in flow cytometers that use high efficiency prisms of gratings to disperse the light collected from single cells across a detector array. The ability to collect the full fluorescence spectrum allows compensation to be replaced by spectral unmixing, which can provide more accurate estimates of label intensity and resolve fluorochromes with significant spectral overlap.  Moreover, spectral flow cytometry opens the door to a new era of flow cytometry instruments and applications. Spectral flow cytometers have simpler optical paths and fewer components than conventional flow cytometers, potentially resulting in lower cost and maintenance. More importantly, spectral flow cytometry enables the use of new types of labeling probes. For example, nanoparticles exhibiting surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) have attracted interest for their multiplexing potential. In this webinar, I will describe the essential elements of spectral flow cytometry and show examples of fluorescence and SERS detection.