It’s been a minute since we recorded any training material, I’m planning to be better about that this year! Here’s some quick notes about the voltage settings on the FSC and SSC detectors.

If you went through the Flow Basics class, you’ll have heard me say something along the line of just use the starting voltage and check on saturating signals. This is true enough for the fluorescent detectors, but not for the scatter signals where the setting will be cell dependent. So this is something you’ll need to do on most platforms since the starting voltages are usually based on the QC beads – which are likely much smaller than your cells – or totally random. The exception in our facility will be if you use the Quanteon or Penteon where the default settings are great for most samples, or on the Attune where we set them on a common cell line (SSC on log).

Oh – and do go have a look at Amy Hazen’s paper on area scaling on the DIVA software!