2016 - A Big Year!

Not just because it has an extra day, but 2016 will be big for the Crick Flow Cytometry Facility. At some point in the middle of this year we will begin moving into the brand new Francis Crick Institute. Situated in the heart of London, next to St Pancras station and the British Library, the Crick will be one of one of the largest biomedical research Institutes in the world - you can read about that here.

For the past 18 months we have been preparing for the merger of the old London Research Institute and National Institute for Medical Research Flow Labs by aligning common practices and cross-training of staff and we are, we think, ready for the move. Because both Labs are large, we plan to move in phases so that we can keep operations running on both sites until all researchers make the move to the new building. It is logistically difficult but we like a challenge!

The Francis Crick Institute, London

In amongst all that, we need to make sure that we keep up with developments in the field - Twitter is a great source of information so via @citometria we were led to this article about using sound to sort cells. We will keep an eye (or maybe an ear) on that.

2015 was a good year for meetings - there was the first UK CYTO meeting for almost 30 years in Glasgow and then in November we had the biennial "Advances in Cytometry" meeting in London plus the usual mix of local flow meetings in London, Cambridge, Aberdeen, Nottingham and more. This year, we have CYTO in Seattle which is always a great place to meet up with old friends but also to see the new innovations in the field, I am always amazed at the breadth of cytometric applications and the passion with which people advocate the technology. But for those of you who can't make that, there is flowcytometryUK2016 which will be held in Leeds in July - planning is underway for that and there will be considerable Crick Flow Lab involvement - more on that later in the year.

We also hope to use this Blog to help promote cytometry education by putting up bite-sized answers to questions we often get from users, our Flow Lab FAQs - so bookmark this page or follow us on Twitter of course!

Derek