To Buy or to Lease? Finding funds for the purchase of flow cytometry equipment in your core facility can be challenging. In this first installment of the Tools of the Trade podcast, we discuss the leasing option offered by First American with Andrew Card and Nick Borkowski. 

RAIFCA's Tools of the Trade podcast highlights lesser-known tools available to flow cytometry core facility staff and users. We do not necessarily endorse the products discussed; our goal is to help listeners gain a better understanding of them.

As much as I want to keep the ChUG podcast light and useful, we've entered a time where every piece of news we hear from the current administration is highly concerning. The media is discussing the stock market using stock images of people grabbing their face with their hands, we hear of NIH cuts and layoffs, and uncertainty is the only variable that is constant. I was happy to have Camille Stegen, Kathy Kluepfel, and Daniel Vocelle to discuss and provide some sense of clarity on how to move forward. So this is not as fun a discussion as we usually have, but I think it's a necessary one.

Regional flow cytometry are where it's at. This is what we have decided here at ChUG. We invited Aja Rieger to discuss the CoLD Summit, Karla Gorena to talk about FlowTex, and Daniel Vocelle to cover GLIIFCA. If you have unquestionably attended CYTO without any second look at other meetings, you've been missing out and this podcast is for you!
Please note: David got pretty excited and dropped some expletives in the first minute of the podcast. Then he got a hold on himself. 

Edit 11/13/24: Karla Moncada Gorena is now Director of Business Development at KCAS! Congrats!

Follow these links to learn more about the meetings:
CCMA/CoLD Summit: https://www.cytometry.ca/2025-cold-summit/
FlowTex: https://www.flowtex.org
GLIIFCA: https://gliifca.org

It was a pleasure to host Dr. Peter O'Toole, Director of the BioScience Technology Facility and Head of Imaging and Cytometry core at the University of York. He is also the host of the other, way more popular, flow cytometry dedicated podcast Flow Stars. We discussed all things podcasting, creating workshops and setting up meetings, and many more topics.

We also discussed the RMS - visit www.rms.org.uk for more details and how to become a member

Subscribe to  @BitesizeBio   - home of  Flow Stars and The Microscopists 

The Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF) had its 2024 annual meeting in Minneapolis and I was asked to chair the Service Contract Session. Pro tip: if that happens to you, you need to recruit Julie Auger, Executive Director at the Salk Institute, and she'll find equally great panelists for the session. It was a pleasure to have Brooke Bean Massani, Director of Research Support Services at the University of Arizona, and Roy Martin, Senior Field Marketing Manager for Biological Mass Spectrometry at Waters join the discussion. And for good measure, we had super secret panelist Marjolijn Hameetman, Operational Manager Flow Core Facility bij Leiden University Medical Center, jump in to discuss the very interesting solution that was developed in her institution. 

My thanks for the ABRF organizing committee for allowing me to be part of this session. 

Note: The sound was edited because my mic was clipping a bit too much for my taste. The result is a sound that is clearer, but we loose the echo of the rooms, ambient noise, clapping and what not. It may also have introduced some weirdness that I couldn't get rid of. Editing is not my job...

Find more information about the next ABRF meeting here - https://abrf.org

You can also see more 2024 meeting sessions on the ABRF Youtube Channel (including the original recording audio for this session) - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAPsVsmQv3BfYkohzItJlYwmsVdF5UqJd

And as always, please remember that ChUG is not sponsored by anyone, and that the views and opinions shared by the panelists are their own, and are based on their own professional expertise and experiences in the field.

Spatial Biology is an emerging technology that can get a heck of lot confusing for David. When David doesn't understand something, he asks people to help. Be like David. Ask Cezary and Daniel to explains things to you.

The gang is back to discuss all kinds of things happening is Flowland! Ryan Duggan, Bert Ladd, Rebecca Bultema, and that other guy discuss which meetings look good this year, the range of ideas floating around reagents used to clean and maintain instruments, the problem of single stain controls when unmixing data, and careers outside of a flow core.

We continuing our exploration of service contracts in the Flow Cytometry with none other than Ray Lannigan, formerly Vice President of Global Sales and Services at Cytek. We couldn't ask for a better guide to explain the details of service contracts form the industry point of view. Here we discuss how service contracts are priced, what kind of leverage is available to negotiate with manufacturers, the other options for those who may want to look elsewhere for service, tracking service on your instruments, rights to repairs, and many other topics. 

'What you don't know is out to kill you' had been the subtitle for the CAT Facility flow basics class for over a decade. It reminds us that the life of a flow cytometrist is filled with peril and danger. One day you're on the top of the world, thinking you know everything about spectral flow. Then some company comes out with a bunch of marketing material and data that make you question all that you ever hold dear. So we invited Ryan Duggan, Dave Adams and Rachael Sheridan to discuss what's going on. We do a review of the current spectral flow platforms on the market, then revisit some eyebrow-raising claims made in marketing material to see how much it hurts that they might be correct.

Ryan ran a discussion on the cell sorters available on the market on the Cytometry on Air podcast, roughly 10 years ago. It's now 2023 and we invited Dave Adams back along with Bill Eades to discuss how things look nowadays. We talked about the premature deployment of cell sorters, ultra-specialization of platforms, and planned obsolescence. We covered the most popular droplet-based platforms available, as well as the microfluidics systems.