Meeting report from the Euroscicon event: 7^th November 2012, Stevenage, UK

Meeting Chair: Dr. Gary Warnes

Blizard Institute, Barts & The London School of Medicine & Dentistry, Queen Mary University

 Author: Dr Andrew Want, Merck Millipore

Editors: Dr Astrid Englezou and Dr Shara Cohen

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Cell suicide is a complex and multifaceted process, present in a wide variety of cell-types, whose function is critical to maintenance of human health. Flow cytometric tools for the understanding of the subcellular processes involved with cell suicide have mostly been focussed on apoptosis, however, this meeting introduces novel flow cytometric methods that can begin to characterise autophagy in a statistically robust way. Included within this, was an introduction to imaging flow cytometry, a method which allows visualisation of cells as in conventional microscopy, but with a far greater number of cells able to be measured. The final presentation of the day outlined the challenges with using flow cytometry within the highly regulated pharmaceutical sector for the analysis of cellular cytotoxicity, illustrating where changes must be made if flow cytometry is to become a truly universal tool.