In high-throughput laboratories, flow cytometry and cell imaging are often done in multiwell microtiter plates. The data from a 96-well microtiter plate, for example, normally contains 96 separate data files. FCS Express can automatically merge the files from any size plate into one dataset and associate each "cell" with the particular well that it was located in. Even if samples were acquired in tubes FCS Express can merge the individual files so they may be represented in a plate heat map or "virtual plate".

 

 

A Plate Heat Map is a graphical representation of your data in a plate-shaped grid with each well of the plate color-coded based on the statistic being displayed.  This enables rapid visualization of wells and outliers by comparing the statistical data in an individual well to the statistical data of the entire microtiter plate.

 

Plate Heat Maps also provide a visualization when SPADE is calculated with the Transformations navigator and applied. Please see the Working with SPADE Transformations section to learn how to use Plate Heat Maps in conjunction with SPADE transformations.

 

By choosing an appropriate color scheme and statistic to display, you can get an overview of all of the wells in your experiment or node(s) within the SPADE tree. You can also create Well Gates to conveniently pool your data or identify node(s) of interest within the SPADE tree.