What Is Flow Cytometry?

Cytometry is the measurement of physical/chemical characteristics of cells or other biological particles. In flow cytometry, these measurements are made as cells in fluid suspension pass, one by one, through a measurement apparatus: the flow cytometer. Flow cytometry is performed on single cell suspensions and is not appropriate for analysis of cell clumps. Flow cytometry provides discrete measurements from each cell in the sample. This provides a distribution rather than an average of the measured characteristics in the cell sample.