We’re back from Madison where Everett and myself attended the GLIIFCA 2023 meeting. Mind you, I’m on the Board of Directors of that meeting so I’m a bit biased here. But it’s a great meeting! It’s only two days so the scientific content is distilled to its purest, most impactful form. The main scientific sessions this year included the role of AI in flow and imaging, and image-based single-cell spatial screening. It’s also a great venue to learn about the latest technologies. The BD FACSDiscover S8 was the talk of the show this year, with Joel Sederstrom testimonial during the core manager meeting, and Karan Kathuria’s presentation on cell-cell interaction of Tregs explored with the Vulcan (a beta version of a BD platform that has the same imaging capability). And of course, it’s the best hang out spot for the cool flow cytometrists in the midwest!

Here’s a few things that caught my attention:

• Compensation with no controls: Dr. Peng Qiu from Georgia Tech is developing an algorithm that would use the fully stained sample to compensate itself. The general idea is that playing with a synthetic data set where the positive and negative populations are well defined, the algorithm will be able to recognize every clusters, and compensate every sinfgle one of them against each other, and in the end, decide on the best compensation value to be included in the compensation matrix. It felt to me like an application of AutoSpill in overdrive. The demonstration was impressive, and although there are caveats when applied to biological samples, it feels like something that could be available fairly soon.
• The Future of Flow: I sat on a panel discussion moderated by Dr Bartek Rajwa along with more influential researchers. The discussion quickly moved to high end parameters and whether or not flow could be considered a multiomics technology along with sequencing and others. I think there’s a cluster of researchers in my field that are exploring the very limits of what can be done, wether it’s the high content panels or EV detection. I sometimes dread going to meetings where we focus on the fringes of the field with next to no consideration for what most flow cytometrists are involved with. I sometimes feel like cytometry is just very boring to most, and we’re trying our very best to make stuff exciting! That’s not what I ended up saying. Also, the Sunday morning session at GLIIFCA needs to go!!

Learn more about GLIIFCA here, and maybe we’ll see you in Covington next year!