Compensation Beads

Compensation beads offer a variety of benefits. The most obvious of these is that they allow you to save more of your cells for your experimental conditions rather than controls. Additionally, compensation beads stain more brightly and uniformly than cells, allowing for easy compensation of colors that may be only on rare events in the cells sample. Importantly, compensation beads can be used with the same antibodies you use for your experiment ensuring a perfect fluorochrome match.
Updated 9/18/17

File: Flow_TechNotes_Compensation-Beads-Tech-Note_20170918.pdf

Titrating Antibodies for Flow Cytometry

Titration allows you to determine the amount of antibody that gives you the best separation of populations in your samples, and the best measure of expression levels. Too little antibody means the cells expressing the marker of interest do not stain as brightly as they could, and may not separate adequately from the negative cells. Too much antibody can increase non-specific binding, which increases the spread and background of the negative population. Both situations result in lower resolution of the measurement.

File: Flow_TechNotes_Antibody-Titrations_20170918.pdf