Poster describes flow cytometry screening system

Agilent's new poster describes a novel automated flow cytometry screening system for cell-based screening of small-molecule compound libraries, RNAi libraries and functional genomics applications.

The fully automated platform described consisted of an Intellicyt Hypercyt High-Throughput Flow Cytometry (HTFC) platform coupled with two Beckman Coulter Cyan flow cytometers and integrated into an Agilent Biocel 1200 sample preparation and plate-handling robotic platform.

The automated system, as configured, performs a diverse set of tasks important for carrying out functional genomics screens (cell culture, transfections, infections, sample concentration and high-throughput flow cytometry) with excellent throughput and minimal manual manipulation.

The technical poster presented at the Society of Biomolecular Sciences conference (SBS 2009) shows how a proof-of-principle functional genomics shRNAmir screen for inhibitors of TGF-ss1 signalling in MPC9A7 cells identified several important regulators of this pathway.

ShRNAmirs targeting known signalling proteins such as Alk5 were readily detected using the HTFC capabilities of this platform.

With the automation configuration presented in the technical poster, throughput of the Hypercyt HTFC platform was doubled compared with stand-alone operation.

Data analysis software associated with the Agilent Biocel 1200 allowed plate-level statistics to be generated within minutes of a screening run.

In addition to speed, the technology substantially reduces the amount of sample aspirated for each analysis, typically acquiring 2ul per well with thousands to tens of thousands of cells in each sample.

A copy of the new technical poster is available by e-mailing Agilent.

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