ISAC E-News -- December 2008

Download the PDF version here.

• News from ISAC Leadership
  • News from Bob Murphy, ISAC President
  • New Executive Director
  • Grant from Wallace H. Coulter Foundation
  • Request for Proposals -Open Source Software Contributions For ISAC Public Flow Cytometry Data Repository
  • Committee Chair Persons Update
  • Membership Report
• Education Committee Report
• Trademarking of Cyto
• Core Managers Task Force
• Membership Services Committee (MSC)
• Standards Committee
• European Cytometry Network
• Meeting Reports
  • The Australasian Flow Cytometry Group (AFCG)
  • Turkish Society of Hematology workshop on “Clinical Applications of Flow Cytometry”
  • Great Lakes International Imaging and Flow Cytometry Association (GLIIFCA)
  • Upcoming Meetings/Conferences/User Groups/Courses

News from ISAC Leadership

News from Bob Murphy, ISAC President

Bob Murphy (Murphy@cmu.edu)

The past three months have been very busy for the ISAC leadership, and have produced some significant developments. As described in this issue of E-news, we have identified a new executive director for the Society, and have received a significant grant from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation in furtherance of the Society’s mission. ISAC has continued to move forward with new initiatives, especially creating a Flow Cytometry Data Repository and exploring development of certification programs for cytometry professionals.

The primary goal of the Flow Cytometry Data Repository will be to provide permanent access to primary data used in peer-reviewed publications. It will support verification of statistical analyses in such publications (in combination with efforts by the Standards Task Force to standardize the description of these analyses), enable meta-analysis across multiple studies, and provide test datasets for development of new algorithms. We also anticipate providing access-controlled storage for pre-publication datasets to facilitate manuscript review and for selected datasets from unpublished studies judged to be of value to the community.

On the certification and education front, we are looking forward to partnering with other organizations in the cytometry field (such as the Clinical Cytometry Society) to ensure that cutting-edge technology is widely-available to realize cytometry’s potential for improving human health.

New Executive Director

Todd R. Philbrick (ToddP@isac-net.org)

Todd Philbrick has been hired by FASEB/ISAC as our new Executive Director. Todd comes to FASEB/ISAC from the Kellen Company. At Kellen, Todd managed several food associations including their boards of directors, committees, conventions, and websites. Prior to Kellen, Todd held a variety of positions with the Pharmacy Technician Certification Board, duties including the development, marketing, and administration of their licensure certification examination. Todd is a lifetime Washington, DC metro area resident and graduated from Salisbury University in Salisbury, MD with degrees in Business Administration and Marketing.

Outside of work Todd’s interests include the Washington area sports teams especially the Redskins as well as exercising, cooking, and hiking.

Welcome aboard Todd!!

Grant from Wallace H. Coulter Foundation

ISAC has received a $100,000 grant from the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation. This grant is to be used to promote the field of flow cytometry with emphasis on programs that are designed to standardize and improve training and qualifications of users of the technology. ISAC will use the grant funds:

• to engage a marketing company to perform a study of the feasibility and value of developing Cytometry certification categories. This study would be in furtherance of the strategic objective of developing and implementing a cytometry certification program consistent with the vision presented by Robert Murphy, ISAC president and Paul Smith, ISAC president-elect, during their August 2008 visit to the Foundation;
• to reimburse ISAC for the expenses associated with the Foundation sponsored dinner with the ISAC board of directors at the past ISAC Congress recently held in Budapest;
• to provide for the expenses that ISAC will incur hosting a dinner between the presidents of the Clinical Cytometry Society and ISAC at the September ESCA meeting in Bremen, Germany;
• for programs consistent with the ISAC mission.

Request for Proposals - Open Source Software Contributions For ISAC Public Flow Cytometry Data Repository

Key Dates

• Release Date: November 21, 2008
• Response Date: December 15, 2008 at 5:00 PM EST

Issued by

The International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC)

Summary

ISAC intends to create a public flow cytometry data repository, with the goal of facilitating verification of analysis of flow cytometry data in published reports, aiding the further development of flow cytometry data analysis software, and enabling the integration of flow cytometry data with other biological databases. ISAC plans to provide open access to the contents of the repository and to the database software (including source code) it will run. To this end, ISAC is soliciting proposals for software contributions to the repository project.

Background

Flow cytometry (FCM) has been widely used by clinicians, immunologists, and cancer biologists for more than 30 years to distinguish different cell types in mixed populations, based on the expression of cellular markers. It has also become a widely used tool in basic biomedical research. In the last decade, advances in instrumentation and reagent technologies have enabled simultaneous single cell measurement of tens of surface and intracellular markers, as well as tens of signaling molecules, positioning FCM to play an even bigger role in medicine and systems biology. The rapid expansion of FCM applications has outpaced the development of storage, analysis, and data representation tools. A single cytometry experiment routinely generates between 100MB and 2GB of data that track and compare biological features of millions of cells. Users are often overwhelmed by this amount of detailed data and often simplify single cell measurements into population summaries, such as percentage of cells in a gate and median signal intensity. Such population aggregates limit the potential insights gleaned from FCM data. Furthermore, data analysis involves use of multiple applications, whose output is often fragmented, and results in published reports are presented with figures that minimally represent the complexity of the underlying datasets and provide few clues to the analysis approach. However, when raw data are linked to figures and summaries other scientists can both verify published findings and conduct new analyses to dig deeper into important datasets. The link to raw data files is crucial, as the FCM field is still maturing and many steps in the data processing pipeline, such as compensation and scale transformations, are not standardized.

The International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) recognized these needs as noted in the March 2005 meeting notes:

“Publication in printed journals is still the primary means of sharing data in cytometry. Though journal publications have been the primary means of developing a peer-reviewed body of scientific knowledge, it is becoming increasing more difficult to present cytometry data and still preserve the full potential of the information contained in large multi-parameter, multi-event data sets.”

ISAC wants to ensure that the best possible resource is delivered to the wider community, including cost- and license-free submission and retrieval of data and appropriate interfaces for search and export.

ISAC also seeks to allow any third party to use the underlying source code (for example, to create a local repository prior to publication), extend the database (and contribute improvements), and interoperate with the repository following free/open source principles.

Information Requested

ISAC solicits proposals for open source contributions from the community of existing software that will aid in the development of the repository. Detailed information is requested on what interfaces (i.e.,

Application Program Interface; API) exist between the database backend and any submission, retrieval or analysis tools. Information on commercial ventures planned or existing that use the existing code should be described. Proposals for donations of development personnel time or other resources are also welcome.

How to Submit a Response

Responses will be accepted until December 15, 2008 via email to murphy@cmu.eduunder the subject heading of “Public Repository RFP.” The collected information will be analyzed and may appear in reports. Although ISAC will try to protect against the release of identifying information there is no guarantee of confidentiality. A summary of the results obtained from the responses to this RFP will be available to the public through http://www.isac-net.org/.

Inquiry

Inquiries concerning this Notice may be directed to:

Attention: Public Repository RFP
Robert F. Murphy
President, ISAC
E-mail: murphy@cmu.edu

Respondents will receive confirmation acknowledging receipt of their responses, but will not receive individualized feedback on any proposals or suggestions. No basis for claims against the ISAC shall arise as a result of a response to this RFP, nor from ISAC’s use of submitted information as either part of its evaluation process or in developing any subsequent policy or announcement.

1 This RFP is for planning purposes only and should not be construed as a solicitation for applications or an obligation on the part of ISAC. ISAC will not pay for the preparation of any information submitted, nor for ISAC’s use of that information.

Committee Chair Persons Update

The following is an updated list of chairpersons for Standing Committees and Task Forces. Their affiliations and email addresses are available on the ISAC Web site: www.isac-net.org

Membership Report

ISAC membership for October 2008 stands at 1,737 of which 844 are members with Cytometry, 685 are members with electronic subscriptions, the balance are students and special category members. For the same period in 2007 there were 1,520 members with 963 with Cytometry, 403 with electronic subscriptions, and the balance being students and special category members.

Education Committee Report

Zosia Maciorowski (zofia.maciorowski@curie.net ), Elaine Kunze (mek4@psu.edu)

We are very fortunate to have an enthusiastic and experienced ISAC education committee. Members include Awtar Krishan, Derek Davies, Gustavo Rohde, H Krishnamurthy, Henning Ulrich, Jonni Moore, Laura Teodori, Lora Barsky, Mike Keeney, Paul Wallace, Ram Achuthanandam and Richard Konz.

On our first conference call in November, following the ISAC strategic plan, we established sub-committees for several specific tasks. The Best Practices subcommittee led by Jonni Moore and Awtar Krishan will create a list of educational websites, evaluate which aspects work well and should be applied to ISAC’s education program and web site.

We plan to establish a database on the ISAC website which will maintain an updated comprehensive list of all flow and image courses, searchable by a variety of keywords such as course level, month, geographic area, specialization, language. The image course subcommittee will be led by Mike Keeney and Elaine Kunze, the flow subcommittee by Derek Davies, Mike Keeney and Zosia Maciorowski. A call for information about courses will be sent to ISAC membership and the Purdue mailing list.

An ISAC data repository will be created on the ISAC web site with slide sets for image and flow, basic, advanced and specialized which can be used for teaching purposes. Co-chairs of the data repository subcommittee are Jonni Moore, Rich Konz and Lora Barsky. Todd Philbrick, ISAC's executive director, will work with the Education committee to establish guidelines for placing slides and materials on an ISAC data repository for common use.

Trademarking of Cyto

At the instigation of Paul Smith, and with the approval of ISAC Council, Paul and Todd Philbrick are pursuing a trademark CYTO as a meeting, conference, and/or name. Council has agreed that ISAC will “brand” its future Annual Congresses using this trademark (beginning with CYTO 2010).

Core Managers Task Force

Derek Davies, Chair, (derek.davies@cancer.org.uk)

The ISAC Core Managers Task Force exists as a resource for new and established core cytometry facilities and also for those who are embarking on the set-up of such a Laboratory. We aim to build up a repository of practical hints and tips via the ISAC-hosted website. Feedback and comments are welcome to derek.davies@cancer.org.uk. In addition, we have a pool of experienced managers who are willing to speak at meetings and offer informal advice. Financial support for meetings may also be available and requests for this should also go to Derek.

Membership Services Committee (MSC)

Tim Bushnell (Timothy_Bushnell@URMC.Rochester.edu), Laura Teodori (teodori@casaccia.enea.it)

The MSC is expanding its efforts. In an effort to better identify and respond to regional membership needs, we have established regional sub-committees and recruited chairs of these committees. The role of each subcommittee is to help disseminate information about ISAC to folks in their region and to recruit additional members to assist them. They will also provide feedback so that we can be responsive to needs within a given region.

• The MSC has also established a Corporate Membership Subcommittee. This committee is charged with recruiting corporate members to give the MSC and Council information on their needs.
• The Adopt A Young Scientist program. This program is a local/regional program where local company representatives and other interested parties will be recruited to help pay ISAC membership dues of a young scientist.
• The ISAC Scholars Program. This is a critical initiative, and needs to be re-evaluated and improved. Areas needing attention include funding, recognition of the program, as well as the nomination process, its review and how awards are made.
• Support of regional meetings. Funds have been requested for FY09 to help support emerging and existing regional meetings. The program, as envisioned, will have ISAC pay the travel costs of a speaker (ideally from an established ISAC speaker bank), who will also be encouraged to set up an ISAC booth with ISAC literature.
• Re-recruiting ‘Lost’ members. We are asking that regional co-chairs contact ‘lost’ members who have not paid their dues in the last year or so to determine why the have not renewed, while encouraging them to do so.
• Young Investigators. It was suggested that we have a quarterly note in the ISAC E-news to keep these individuals informed about information important to them. Some items include highlighting job opportunities, internship possibilities and funding for new investigators.
• Technicians. This membership group is often overlooked. We need to identify and recruit this group of individuals.
• MSC Connections. This committee and other ISAC committees have common and intersecting interests. To build on these interests we will work with the Education Committee to develop educational programs as they are a major membership value and a powerful mechanism to help recruit new members. We also need to develop a better information packet for new members.

Standards Committee

Dave Basiji, Ryan Brinkman, Gary Durack, Bob Hoffman, Michal Kozubek, Bob Murphy, John Nolan (Chair), Ann Plant, Mario Roederer, Gregor Rothe, Paul Smith, Jim Wood

The ISAC Standards Committee provides advice to ISAC Council about needs and opportunities in standards development for cytometry, facilitates and coordinates the activities of additional task forces focused on specific standards issues, and reviews the products of these task forces and make recommendations on their implementation to ISAC Council. Currently, we are focusing on two areas to improve the exchangeability of cytometry data.

The Flow Cytometry Data Standards Task Force, chaired by Ryan Brinkman ( University of British Columbia), is continuing its work to develop standards for the description of flow cytometry experiments and analyses. One recent product of this effort is Minimum Information About a Flow Cytometry Experiment (MIFlowCyt), which makes recommendations for describing samples and reagents, instrument configuration, and data analysis. Another is Gating-ML, an XML-based specification for describing gating, data transformation, and compensation of flow cytometry data. Reports on both of these were recently published in Cytometry. The Task Force’s current activities are focused on standardizing formats for the exchange of cytometry data. More information can be found at http://flowcyt.sourceforge.net/.

An Image Cytometry Data Standards Task Force, chaired by Anne Plant (National Institutes of Standards and Technology), has been chartered to develop a consensus on how to exchange information about image cytometry experiments and analyses. Several efforts have been made to address this need in the past, but none has been widely adopted. The ISAC effort will engage experts from within and outside ISAC to develop a consensus on how to capture and convey essential information about image cytometry experiments required for data sharing across laboratories. Watch for more information on this effort in the coming months.

The Standards Committee will continue to review the state of standards in cytometry and make recommendations to ISAC Council regarding activities to facilitate consensus development to improve making, analyzing, and sharing quantitative measurements of cells and cell systems. ISAC members wishing to provide input to the Standards Committee or serve on a task force are encouraged to contact Committee Chair John Nolan ( jnolan@ljbi.org) or ISAC Executive Director Todd Philbrick ( toddp@isac-net.org).

European Cytometry Network

Following an initial meeting in February 2008, Andy Riddell and Alexis Perez Gonzales at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany have set up the European Cytometry Network. This is a web-based forum based on a social networking platform which allows cytometrists to contact each other, set up interest groups, advertise meetings and jobs and much more. Visit http://euroflownet.ning.com or contact Andy ( riddell@embl.de).

Meeting Reports

The Australasian Flow Cytometry Group (AFCG)

Kathy Heel ( kathy.heel@uwa.edu.au)

The AFCG held its 31st Annual Scientific Meeting in Fremantle, Western Australia on August 13-15th. The meeting included over 120 clinical and research flow cytometrists from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. The presentations covered a wide range of topics from the use of flow cytometry to profile the immune response to HIV, CMV and cancer, to the implementation of 8-colour flow cytometry in the clinical laboratory. One of the highlights was a presentation by Professor Fiona Wood, 2005 Australian of the Year, on using a multidisciplinary scientific and clinical approach to achieving scar free healing after burn injury. A full day techniques workshop was held prior to the meeting, focusing on technical aspects of flow cytometry such as experimental controls, multicolour flow, data analysis and rare cell detection. There were also two open panel discussions, providing new and old flow cytometrists alike an opportunity to question experts in the field. Further information on the AFCG and the 31st Annual Scientific Meeting can be found at http://afcg.org.au/home.asp

Turkish Society of Hematology workshop on “Clinical Applications of Flow Cytometry”

Gulderen Demirel, gydemirel@yahoo.com

The workshop was organized by the Laboratory Standards Subcommittee of the Turkish Society of Hematology and held on the medical campus of the Ankara University, November 6-9, 2008. The Turkish organizing committee consisted of Drs Mustafa Yenerel, Aydan Ikinciogullari, Klara Dalva and Gulderen Yanikkaya Demirel. Workshop was organized with the help and advice of of Drs. Awtar Krishan (University of Miami Medical School), William Telford (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda), and Scott Cram (Los Alamos National Labs).

Eighty four registered attendees (124 participants including local faculty, technicians and engineers) shared an intense program of wet labs, lectures and tutorials during three and a half days. Fifty two attendees were registered for the wet lab sessions. Small groups rotated thru five labs equipped with the latest flow analyzers from Beckman Coulter, Becton Dickinson and Partec. The vendors provided instruments, reagents and staff to run the labs. Faculty members invited included Drs. Vincent Shankey, William Telford, Scott Cram and Metin Kurtoglu from the USA, Dr. Micheal Keeney from Canada, Dr. Sumeet Gujral from India, Dr. Wolfgang Gohda from Germany and Drs. Zafer Gulbas, Zafer Baslar, Emel Eksioglu Demiralp, Mustafa Yenerel, Aydan Ikinciogullari, Klara Dalva and Gulderen Yanikkaya Demirel from Turkey.

Lectures, tutorials and wet labs covered cell cycle and proliferation, apoptosis, immunophenotyping, stem cell analysis, panels for hematological malignancies, circulating tumor and endothelial cells, signal transduction red cell and platelet analysis, quality control and flow cytogenetics. Simultaneous translation of the lectures in English and Turkish was provided. In the wet labs both English and Turkish speaking faculty worked as a team to minimize language problems and help the students to understand the presentations. Even though this was a heterogeneous group of attendees, attendance in all the sessions was very good.

Ankara, the capital city of Turkey and somewhat less known than Istanbul with its Anatolian life style, hosted this successful workshop.

Attendees were asked to rate the presentations and make suggestions. Majority of the students rated the presentations as very good to excellent. The attendees made several suggestions for inclusion of subjects for future workshops.

Financial support for travel of the visiting faculty was provided by the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) and the Clinical Cytometry Society (CCS). Support from Beckman Coulter, Becton Dickinson, Partec and the Wallace H.Coulter Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.

Great Lakes International Imaging and Flow Cytometry Association (GLIIFCA)

Mary Paniagua (mpaniagu@bsd.uchicago.edu), Ryan Duggan (rduggan@bsd.uchicago.edu)

GLIIFCA held its 17 th annual meeting from September 19 - 21, 2008 at the Milwaukee Hyatt in Milwaukee, WI. The annual meeting provides a welcoming venue to practitioners of cytometry and image analysis from all specialties and at all levels of expertise, as well as providing for excellent networking opportunities and a dose of fun. The format, which includes presentation of a range of topics to suit a variety of participant interests, was on display again this meeting to the benefit of the 130 registrants. The program committee for GLIIFCA 17 was led by Paul Wallace (President) with Michael Sramkoski and Vera Donnenberg. The meeting was generously supported by 28 vendors.

Program elements included the following symposia and speakers:

• Industrial Science Symposium (organizers Karen Domenico and Tom Sawyer)--this format featured brief talks from eight vendors highlighting the latest developments in technology from probes to software to instrumentation.
• Clinical Cytometry--speakers David Hedley (Univ. Toronto), William Geddie (Univ. Toronto), and Mike Keeney ( London Health Sciences Center)
• Cutting Edge Cytometry, Stem Cells -- speakers Fred Preffer (Massachusetts Gen.) TeaSoon Park (Univ. Pittsburgh), and Ludovic Zimmerlin (Univ. Pittsburgh)
• Image cytometry—speakers Betsy Repasky ( Roswell Park) and Evan Jacobs (UMD-New Jersey)
• Technical innovations in cytometry—speakers Bartek Rajwa (Purdue), Jim Jacobberger (Case Western) and Andrew Bantly (Univ. Pennsylvania)

GLIIFCA also hosted the popular pre-meeting Resource Managers Workshop, which focused on topics including Biosafety Issues in a Core Facility (Kevin Holmes), Marketing Your Services, as well as an update on the Core Manager’s QA/QC initiative.

Honors and awards of note included the following: The GLIIFCA Steering Committee welcomed C. Bruce Bagwell (Verity) as the Carleton and Sigrid Stewart Plenary Lecturer. The 2008 Alexander Nakeff Young Investigator Award was given to Evan Jacobs (UMD-New Jersey) for his presentation “Study of the Interaction between Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cells and Virus-infected Cells.” Outstanding poster awards winners included, Anupama Gopisetty (Univ. Illinois, Chicago) Rebecca Copeland (Northwestern U), and Andrew Bantly (Univ. Pennsylvania). In addition, travel awards were given to eight registrants who presented posters at the meeting. Spherotech will sponsor an annual award beginning in 2009 in honor of Jeffrey Wang, given to an up-and-coming cytometrist who best exemplifies the spirit of Jeff, especially his determination in the face of adversity. A selection committee has been established, and application details will be made available on the GLIIFCA web site as they are finalized.

The program committee for GLIIFCA 18 will be led by Mike Sramkoski (President), with Vera Donnenberg and Keith Shults. The meeting will be held October 1 - 3, 2009, in Pittsburgh, PA. Please visit the GLIIFCA web site ( www.gliifca.org) for meeting developments and Steering Committee contact information.

Upcoming Meetings/Conferences/User Groups/Courses

January 27-30, 2009. Hands-on Flow Cytometry Course in York. Announcing a four day intensive hands-on course covering basics through more advanced techniques, see our web site at: http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/biol/tf/ic_flowcourse.htm. Instructors will include Peter O'Toole ( University of York), Ian Brotherick (BeckmanCoulter), Derek Davies (CRUK), Adrian Robins ( University of Nottingham). Contact: PeterO'Toole pot1@york.ac.uk

February 10, 11, 12, 2009. Quantitative Imaging Cytometry Course, ColdSpringHarbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. Registration and poster submission are now open at the Center’s website, www.imagingcytometrycenter.com. Scientific presentations each morning will include the following: Emergence of Quantitative Imaging Cytometry, Cell-Based Applications, Tissue-Based Applications. Contact: Pamela Moody, moody@cshl.edu

February 11, 2009 . Practicalities of Flow Cytometry, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UKPlease find below a pdf file for a one-day meeting/course Ian Dimmick and I are holding next February at the North East Stem Cell Institute within the International Centre for Life, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (UK). The course will cover many aspects of flow cytometry including instrument layout, sample preparation, quality control, multicolour flow cytometry and compensation, cell sorting and data analysis, together with specific techniques and applications such as cell cycle analysis, detection of apoptosis and assessment of telomere length. All topics will be discussed from the basic principles up to more advanced levels (as determined by individual speakers) to ensure the meeting will be of interest to all levels. There will also be a complimentary seminary for all delegates on FlowJo software, which will be given by Dr Claudio Vallan on behalf of TreeStar Inc. http://www.cyto.purdue.edu/flowcyt/meetings/newcastle_2009.pdf Contact: Rebecca Stewart rebecca.stewart@newcastle.ac.uk

February 16-20, 2009. 10^th INDO-US Cytometry Workshop on “The Application of Flow Cytometry in Infectious Disease Biology The Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India, and the Pathology Department, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine are sponsoring this workshop. This five day workshop will present lectures, panel discussions, tutorials and wet labs to review and demonstrate the various flow cytometry methods for infectious disease biology which includes basics of analytical cytometry and sorting, proliferation and apoptosis, phenotype analysis, phosphorylation and signal transduction, cytokine expression, malaria, leishmania, filariasis and host immunology, immunodeficiency and HIV monitoring. For additional information and application forms please visit our website: http://www.cytometryworkshops.com/ Email contacts: tatha@ils.res.in and rhamelik@med.miami.edu. NOTE: The 10 th Workshop will immediately follow the second annual meeting of the Cytometry Society of India .

March 12 - 14, 2009. NW Regional Cytometry Meeting. The meeting will be held at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The umbrella of the meeting includes a clinically-oriented Saturday session, a FICCS meeting on Friday, two FloCyte courses, vendor talks, and a half day cytometry program for middle and high school teachers.

Schedule of events: March 12, ­ FloCyte course (Data Analysis); March 13, ­ Flow Informatics and Computational Cytometry Society (FICCS) meeting, FloCyte course (Multiparameter Flow Cytometry), and vendor talks; March 14, NW Regional Cytometry meeting, cytometry program for teachers. If you have any questions about the program, or about your participation, please contact the program coordinator, Julie Hill, at nwrcytometrym@gmail.com , or Allan Kachelmeier at kachelme@ohsu.edu.

March 12-13, 2009. Advanced Flow Course, Seattle. The Northwest Regional Cytometry group has again invited FloCyte Regional Training Institute to present two days of advanced flow courses, the Multiparameter and Compensation Course, and debut a new Data Analysis course, both taught by Dr. Timothy Bushnell of U Rochester. These will be held at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in conjunction with (and scheduled the two days before) the Northwest Regional Cytometry meeting (see above). For those attending the meeting, there will be a discount for the tuition! Watch for details at www.FloCyte.org

July 15-17, 2009. flowcytometryUK holds its second National meeting at Keble College, Oxford, UK. The conference will highlight advances in flow and image instrumentation, high content screening, cancer and stem cell biology, applications of clinical cytometry and the development of novel probes and approaches in many areas of biomedical research. Confirmed plenary speakers include Ger van den Engh ( Seattle, USA), Paul Smith ( Cardiff, UK), Bill Telford ( NIH, USA), David Hedley ( Ontario, Canada) and Austin Smith ( Cambridge, UK). Delegates from clinical, research and industrial fields are invited to submit both oral and poster abstracts. The deadline for oral abstracts is 1 March 2009 and for poster abstracts 1 April 2009 There will be a large commercial exhibition as well a session devoted to commercial tutorials where delegates can be updated on recent advances in the field. Further information including abstract submission details: http://www.flowcytometryuk.org/html/flowcytometryuk2009.html. Registration details: http://www.rms.org.uk/form_flowcambridge07.html. Contact: Derek Davies, derek.davies@cancer.org.uk

September 3-8, 2009. 2^nd Turkey-US Flow Cytometry Workshop, Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey. Focus areas will include cell cycle and proliferation, apoptosis, applications of cytometry in transplantation and recent advances in cytometry. Contacts for additional information: Dr. Emel Eksioglu-Demiralp, Faculty of Medicine, Marmara University ( demiralp@marmara.edu.tr) and Dr. Awtar Krishan, University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Florida (AKrishan@med.miami.edu)