I’m performing flow cytometry on lung and kidney tissues from mice, with cell yields in the range of several million per organ. My goal is to accurately identify neutrophils, macrophages, monocytes and T cells. What is the minimum number of total events you’d recommend acquiring per sample to ensure reliable detection and statistical power for these cells?
Hi Himanshu Goswami
A good rule of thumb is to aim for at least 10,000 events in your rarest target population. In your case, I think T cells might be relatively abundant, but neutrophils and monocytes might be less frequent, though typically ≥1% of CD45⁺ cells. To reliably capture ~10,000 events for those subsets, you should plan to acquire at least 1,000,000 events gated on live CD45⁺ singlets, from which you can then define your populations. In general, the more cells you collect, the better your statistical power. If needed, you can always downsample or gate on acquisition time afterward. For additional details, please see the attached reference. Additionally, you might want to consider normalization if you're going to compare these counts.
All the Best!
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Chemistry
- Biochemistry
- Biochemical Techniques
- Blotting Techniques
- Immunoblotting
- Dyes