Recent requests for help

I recently received two e-mails from some colleagues asking for some help in not so explored plant flow cytometry subjects.

You can see their messages below and if you have can give them any feedback to their question, they will certainly be very grateful.

E-mail 1:
"Dear all,

One groups wants to separate Lolium nuclei from the organelles... This project is really challenging for me and I'll need some help.

The main target is separating mitochondria (urgent application) and the second target is sorting chromosomes. Lolium has 7 chromosomes in the haploid set. As I told you I'm a little bit out of the Botany field now and I would like to come back... Do you have some protocols, procedures, papers, information, tips and tricks... that could help me? For analysis I think I shouldn't have big problems because of the equipments that I've in the lab, but for sorting I could be limited because I've a FACSAria and it has a 70 and a 100 um nozzles.

Nevertheless, probably the higher restriction for chromosome sorting it could be that instead of a UV laser the Aria has a violet laser...

Any help will be very welcome.

Kind regards,

Dr. Alfonso Blanco Fernández (e-mail: alfonso.blanco@ucd.ie)
Flow Cytometry Core Facilities
UCD - Conway Institute of Biomolecular & Biomedical Research
University College Dublin,
IRELAND"

E-mail 2:
"Hello Joao,

Please can I have a question – do you have an experience in plant cell sorting based on neutral lipids content – ideally using auto-fluorescence. We have a customer who is sorting algae and cyanobacteria based on neutral lipids content – and asked us for an advice in this..

Thanks,

Roman Navratil , Ph.D. (e-mail: Roman.Navratil@i-cyt.com)
Applications Specialist
iCyt Mission Technology, Inc.
Praha, CZECH REPUBLIC"

Your help is needed! You can reply to these problems either by commenting this post or by contacting directly the researchers through the e-mail given in each message.

The Annals of Botany Plant Genome Horizons Special Issue

As it was premiered in the blog 2 and 1/2 months ago, the Annals of Botany has just released a Special Issue dedicated to Plant Genomes in tribute of Michael Bennett's, a leading researcher on this area that decided to retire from the Jodrell Laboratory (Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, UK) in 2007.

As expected this is a very interesting issue of the Annals of Botany, that covers very different topics of plant genomes and opens future horizons. The issue is composed by a nice introduction that explores the contribution of Michael Bennett (in the picture) to Genome Research, some reviews and several research papers.

It is definitely worth reading.

Contribution area of the FLOWer database is available

Finally the contribution area of the FLOWer database is up and running. By this way you can help us to improve the database by providing either the pdf file or the reference to any of the missing articles.

Many thanks in advance for your important contribution for the improvement of the database.

European Cytometry Network Meeting report

The EMBL Flow Cytometry Core Facility has just posted the report of First European Cytometry Network Meeting (28-29th February 2008) that I've been talking you about recently on the blog. It is a very interesting reading on the expectations of the participants of the meeting. It also provides a current state of the community.

Download the report

The main developers of the network, Andy Ridell and Alexis Gonzalez, are still open to your feedback, so you can get access to the survey that was made in here. After filling it you can send it to:
Flow Cytometry Core Facility
EMBL Meyerhofstr. 1,
Heidelberg D-69117
Germany

Enjoy your reading! By the way in the picture you can have an idea of the countries represented in the European Network Cytometry Meeting.

Oxalis genus in South Africa

In order to highlight some of the current interests of the Facilities of Flow Cytometry in Prague and Pruhonice (Czech Republic), I will post some illustrative posters that were prepared and designed by Jan Suda.

Let's start with the poster (click on the image to have a full screen view) regarding the studies of ploidy level and genome size that we have been conducting in the Oxalis species from South Africa.

Update of the FLOWer database

We are developing great efforts to put the FLOWer database working as we wanted. After having some problems with the first version of the database, a new version is being implemented and today it is finally possible to search by Family, Genus and Species. It is a great improvement as these are some of the most important fields that a researcher may want to search when consulting the database. Other small changes have also been made, such as sorting by columns on the "Search Results", and some formatting issues on the "Articles Details" sections.

Soon, we expect to have the Contribution area finished, and then you can help us more actively by providing the reference to missing articles on the database.

We will post any more relevant updates when it is convenient.

Late-breaking submissions on ISAC 2008 congress

There are still 6 days to submit an abstract to present a poster in the next ISAC Congress in Budapest (17th to 21st of May). The organization opened the late-breaking submissions until the next 9th of April, so this is the last chance to bring some of your work to the most important congress on cytometry.

I remember that this is the first time that plant flow cytometry is highly represented in a ISAC Congress. There will be a tutorial and two workshops totally dedicated to this important, but still minority field of flow cytometry.

Please read this older post of the blog for further details concerning the congress and especially the plant sciences sections.

And Budapest is also very beautiful!