Automation of clustering procedures: a new version of the flowEMMi algorithm

Flow cytometry has become a powerful technology for studying microbial community dynamics and ecology. Therefore, there is a big demand for automated clustering procedures, not only in exploratory studies but also in monitoring and control of biotechnological processes for the evaluation of microbial cytometric samples derived from biotechnology, natural environment, as well as agricultural and human health disciplines. This demand has led to a number of publications in the past few years with recent advances in both quality of gating* procedures and the running times of the  gating algorithms. 

In her recently published co-written paper, PROMICON partner Susann Müller (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ), researches automatic, fast, hierarchical and non-overlapping gating of flow cytometric data. In the study, the authors present a new version of the flowEMMi algorithm that bridges a crucial bottleneck between automated cell sample collection and processing, and automated flow cytometric measurement on the one hand, as well as automated downstream statistical analysis on the other hand. Consequently, the study highly recommends the use of flowEMMi v2 as a valuable and reliable tool for automated gating of spatiotemporal series of cytometrically measured microbial communities, providing reliable data for ecological interpretation of community behavior and dynamics. 

Read the full paper here.

*The process by which a channel in a cell membrane opens or closes.

Photo: Visualized workflow of the overlap removal in flowEMMi v2.