sample pool - (Sep/14/2011 )

If no. of cells are less can we pool cell suspentions for flow cytometry?

This is not so much a flow cytometry question, but a biological question. if you were taking spleen cells from litter mates as a control and didn't have enough cells, then it would probably be fine to pool samples and stain together. However, I would question whether you really have enough cells or not. See a paper from Mario Roederer entitled, How many events is enough? Are you Positive? http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cyto.a.20549/full

If you're optimising protocols and cells are limited, I'd say you can pool samples from the same group for analysis. This is only if you know all cell lines that that group are homologous. I wouldn't pool samples for actual runs.

Has anyone pooled samples for the isotype control? Say if you had 5 cell lines from each group - so 5 tubes with marker-of-interest antibody and 1 tube (containing all 5 pooled in one) with the isotype control?