Flow cytometry allows the study of isolated, in suspension cells carried by a liquid vector. With this technique, you obtain an individual, qualitative and quantitative caracterisation of cells.

Each particle, carried by the liquid, passes through a laser beam and the cytometer collects the optical or physical signals. The provided signals are relative to :

-the optical properties linked to the laser light scatter (size, intracellular complexity)

-the optical properties linked to the emitted fluorescence due to specific staining of structures or cellular fonctions.

This individual analysis (cell by cell) is multiparametric and can be done at the speed of several thousand events per sec.

An application of flow cytometry is cell sorting that allows the physical separation of one or several cells populations.