Our understanding of cell biology has significantly improved with the development of single cell technologies such as cellular indexing of transcriptomes and epitopes by sequencing (CITE-seq). Such technologies have allowed the complex cellular make up of tissues to be examined in an unbiased manner, leading to the discovery of new cell types and previously unappreciated cellular heterogeneity. However, while these studies infer cellular functions, they do not allow these to be validated. For this, one must be able to identify, and purify the cells for downstream imaging and/or functional analyses utilizing multi-parameter panels of antibodies. Here, flow cytometry has long been the gold standard for this. However, this field has also changed substantially in recent years. Conventional flow cytometry and its issues regarding cell autofluorescence and multi-parameter
panel compensation is now being replaced by spectral flow cytometry. This overcomes these issues using spectral unmixing whereby the entire emission spectrum of each fluorescence molecule & the unstained cells is measured and accounted for. Moreover, the recently launched combination of spectral flow cytometry and high-speed cell imaging means that researchers can now combine many of these analyses in one step on one machine. Such technology, which can also be applied to, for example, the analysis of subcellular components is hence a game changer and thus with FullPicture we aim to bring this to Ghent University.