Building 580, Babraham Institute, Babraham Research Campus, Cambridge, CB22 3AT rachael.walker@babraham.ac.uk 01223 496559
Rachael has over 15 years of experience in flow cytometry and cell sorting and over a dozen years of working in flow cytometry core facilities. Rachael joined the core in September 2012, following 7 years running Flow Cytometry Core Facilities at the University of Cambridge.
Rachael has extensive experience in analysis and sorting cells of differing types including; immunology, cell biology, stem cell biology, large cells such as cardiomyocytes, c. elegans eggs; organelles such as nuclei. Rachael can provide expertise in experimental setup, optimisation and analysis. She can help with optimal instrument set up, post-acquisition analysis of data and preparing figures for papers.
2005- PhD in Tissue Engineering, Department of Clinical Engineering, University of Liverpool 2001- BMedSc (Honours), Biomedical Materials Science, University of Birmingham
Rachael is very involved with the flow cytometry community on a local, national and international level.
Awarded International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) Scholarship 2012-2014
P-Rex1 is a guanine-nucleotide factor for the small GTPase Rac (Rac-GEF) that is known to mediate neutrophil migration and ROS production in response to the activation of GPCRs. These roles of P-Rex1 are assumed to require its activation of Rac.
Although spectral flow cytometry has become a ubiquitous tool for cell analysis, the use of spectral cytometry on cell sorters requires additional considerations arising from the unique requirements of sorting workflows. Here, we show that care should be taken when ascertaining the purity of a sort on a spectral cell sorter, as the mismatch of buffers used for initial sample suspension and the buffers used for sort collection can affect the unmixing of the data, potentially giving rise to erroneous purity check results.
Cell sorting is a technique commonly used in academic and biotechnology laboratories in order to separate out cells or particles of interest from heterogeneous populations. Cell sorters use the same principles as flow cytometry analyzers, but instead of cell populations passing to the waste of the instrument, they can be collected for further studies including DNA sequencing as well as other genomic, in vitro and in vivo experiments. This chapter aims to give an overview of cell sorting, the different types of cell sorters, details on how a cell sorter works, as well as protocols that are useful when embarking on a journey with cell sorting.