How important is gating?

Gating your samples is one of the most crucial parts of data analysis. The example below shows how without a good gating strategy you would identify up to 30% false-positive events to be CD8+, when in reality this signal is contamination from sticky cells such as platelets or erythrocytes. Gating might be straightforward for smaller, 3-8 color panels, but becomes highly complex for 20+ marker panels identifying over 30 immune populations.

Our gating starts by excluding debris, dead cells, platelets and red blood cells. In a next step, we remove Basophils, Eosinophils and other Granulocytes. This allows us to report the remaining immune cell frequencies as a percentage of non-Granulocytes, making it easy for you to compare percentage numbers between samples.

Check out the flow plots below for an example of how our gating strategy helps identify clean populations of true CD4+ and CD8+ T-cells within CD3+ non-Granulocytes.