I discuss the basic principles behind Flow Cytometry and its uses in industry to help scientists and engineers quickly classify a population of cells using fluorescent markers or fluorophores. Fluorophores absorb photons that fall within an excitation band and emit photons of a lower energy (higher wavelength) in the emission band. Machines that perform flow cytometry operations are commonly referred to as Fluorescent Activated Cell Sorters (FACS) and are very high throughput depending on the instrument.
