I run bone marrow and peripheral blood samples for Immunophenotyping, our interest is leukemia diagnosis, we got a BD Facs Lyric, and it's my first time of experience with a cytometer such like this one (I used to use a FACS Calibur), one of the premises of the Lyric is you don't need to do Compensation, just one every six months. We're seen not all of our samples fit into this compensation so, should I do compensation every shorter period of time? Should I do compensation for every sample?
If you have the answer for this, please let me know. And also any general compensation information is appreciated!
Normally after providing any new equipment to the diagnostic or the research lab, there are several mandatory steps from the provider to the department and one from these steps is the staff training course and oral presentation about this technique. I assume this step does not happen and then the provider should do in person training for all the staff and explain the troubleshooting issues and then help to create the user file and equipment master file. If you are not more confident to use the equipment and run the patient samples so I recommend you to talk with your supervisor and his responsibility to train you or call the provider or at least send you to close center to take your training program. Don't worry because this is part from your right. Good Luck.
As long as you are running their CS&T beads for calibration as recommended it should be fine. If samples do not fit the compensation you can always do it manually if you have enough sample or you can use TBNK cell controls like the ones from Slingshot which are synthetic cells that can be single stained if you are more concerned about the compensation accuracy.
We do Reference Settings every 60 days, which is the BD recommended interval if using BD FC Beads for "compensation". Are you using the BD FC Beads? Comp Beads? We use BD FC beads for 14 fluors. We use comp beads for other antibody/fluorochrome combinations, and some of those are lot specific (especially tandem dyes). Compensation for a few of our antibody/fluorochrome combinations must use cells. For several others we use SpectraComp beads, and for live/dead stain, ViaComp beads (cell mimics, both from Slingshot Bio). I hope this helps a little.