I think there's so much about cell sorting
that should have been automated
for a long, long time
I should not have to sit in front of that sorter
with all my expertise, and all my excitement about science
and all my ability to participate in the research process
and spend hours and hours watching the drop delay.
Now we have a cell sorter that does all that for me
that allows the investigator to put their cells on the sorter
and go back to what's exciting about research.
I'm Carol Oxford
I'm a staff scientist at Bio-Rad.
Before I came to Bio-Rad,
I was the core manager for flow cytometry and cell sorting
at UC Davis for 25 years.
I think one of the best parts about being a core manager
is really being able to see the investigators...
what their hypothesis is -
where they want to go with their research
and really being a part of that.
And I think one of the worst parts about being a core manager
is sitting and watching a cell sorter sort.
Sorting has change really drastically over the years.
I think the biggest thing that changed
was the advent of fluorescent protein
and molecular biology.
These sorts are generally one-color, maybe two-color sorting
sorting GFP, and mCherry, and some fluorescent proteins,
and these sorts are always simple.
They're always one-color, two-color sorts,
and these were a huge percentage of the sorting that I did when I worked at Davis.
What the S3 does is it fills the niche
of the simple experiments.
It's a two-laser, four-color system
that allows the investigator much more access to cell sorting
that they didn't have before.
I think sometimes in the flow cytometry community
and I know I'm certainly guilty of this at times
is we think about things the way we've always done them
and we try and improve on the same system.
And Propel...thought completely differently
about how to calculate the drop delay.
And sometimes that brings to light really new ideas
Sometimes those ideas didn't work.
In this case, they worked brilliantly.
I'm Dan Fox.
I'm the Director of R&D at Propel Labs.
So, our idea of optimizing the drop delay calibration process
really evolved from turning it on its head.
You have particles that are moving at 20--30 meters per second.
The particles you're looking at are somewhere in the 1--10 micron range.
So you have these fast-moving, tiny, tiny particles that you're trying to detect.
Instead of trying to catch these particles in flight,
where they're going very fast,
let's look instead at where the instrument is setup incorrectly.
So when the ProDrop™ system is calibrating to come up with the optimal drop delay,
it starts with a value that it knows is incorrect.
So there are particles that are going through into the waste stream
and it can count those and it can detect them.
Once it's established that, it can sweep the time delay
(the drop delay value)
until it finds the optimal point, where no more particles are in the waste stream
meaning that they're all deflected.
And it sweeps past that, so you build a nice graph.
So you see this V showing where it was incorrect
and where it was optimal.
and we can pick that optimal value.
One of the great things about bringing in people that weren't used to writing flow cytometery software
was that they would stop and ask these questions: "So, why do we do it this way?"
"Well, because that's how we've done it for fifteen years."
"Well, is that the right way to do it?"
And we'd stop, and we'd requestion all these assertions that we had in our heads
all these ways of doing things
and we came up with a lot of better ways of doing it.
This was totally a rethink on the best way to accomplish
the goal of sorting cells.
I think the key to understanding the S3
is its simplicity.
But just because it's easy doesn't mean that it's lost in any of its power.
We have Coherent lasers and Hamamatsu PMTs
and we have high-speed electronics.
You're still gonna get the same kind of speed and recovery and sensitivity
that you have on the bigger sorters.
It's just much simpler to operate.
I think the partnership between Bio-Rad and Propel
is sort of part of the new paradigm.
We combine the strengths a small company and a big company.
Propel brings the engineering and the state-of-the-art expertise
and the large company, Bio-Rad,
brings manufacturing power, technical support,
and service support.
I think it's a perfect partnership.
Anytime investigators have access to more technology,
and understand the technology,
they're going to do more research.
They're going to do more exciting things with the technology.
And the applications are endless from that point.
So any time you give them access
to more technology,
research progresses.
And that's what we all want.