Dear Sudheer Babu,

please find attached a slide I prepared form an experiment with that question in mind.

I would say it depends on the differences you are seeing/expecting in my example 100 might be enough to differentiate LSK and MNC but not t-cells. You might also perceive that in the t-cell experiment two groups of t-cells might be recognizable with in the 5000 cell histogram.

I would like to encourage you to make a comparable experiment and determine the number of cell you would need.

Best wishes Soenke

Hello, the simple answer is to determine how many cells you need in order to get an assay window of greater than or equal to 2 with the appropriate positive control.

You can also test various numbers of cells for negative and positive control for each end point then use z prime factor to see what gives you the best performance. Zhang et al, 1999, J Biomolecular Screening, 4:67-73