There’s a few items I’d like to share that may help users of the Aurora in the CAT Facility and elsewhere.

1 – The benefits of Cytek Cloud

Cytek Cloud is an online platform that offers both a panel and SpectroFlo experiment builder tool. The Panel builder is very similar to other version such as Easy Panel and Fluorofinder. The neat touch is that once you are done building your panel, you’ll get the chance to create an SpectroFlo experiment template the you can upload directly on the acquisition computer (transfer the file by email or through some cloud platform such as Box). You don’t really need to go through the panel design tool to create an experiment, you can just use the experiment builder tool and it will get you the same experiment template. For those of you who don’t like to enter all this information while sitting in form of the Aurora, this tool should allow you to save a bit of time!

2 – The mystery of the bent probes

We’ve been replacing the sample probe fairly often recently and have been scratching our head about why we need to do this so often. Each of them are $285, so we definitely want them to last as long as possible. One possible culprit is a software/hardware bug within the system that occurs whenever we try to run the shutdown or clean flow cell protocol using the 40-tube rack. The rack doesn’t get homed properly, and as the sample line comes down, it hits the side of the rack and gets bent that way. This is a problem that had been reported several months ago, and it seems that Cytek is working on a solution. In the meantime, the fix around this seems to be to make sure to hit ‘Load’ before running either of these protocols. This will get the rack to be set in the right position. This issue is specific to the ASL version of the plate loader (the newer one installed on the Auroras in the main lab at the CAT Facility).

Is that the whole mystery? We don’t really know! This is why you can let us know if you have any additional observations to share!

By the way, I found this information through the Aurora User Community page, which is not always the most exciting place but contains some valuable information.

3 – We’re looking at the Aurora CS

As we look for opportunities to update or cell sorters, we’ve been looking at the Aurora CS. We only had an online demo of the instrument so far, so It’s a bit hard to gauge how useful it would be for the users of our facility. I’ve been pleased to learned that Cytek has plans to make simpler analysis a bit easier for users who do not really wish to use the Unmixing algorithm, but I haven’t seen what that solution will look like yet. At this point, my question to our users is how many of you would like to use their current panels that you are using on the Aurora to actually sort cells. That information will be tremendously useful to me. Leave a note in the comments below, or reach out to us by email.