Applying Artificial Intelligence And Bioinformatics To Create Complete Picture Of Immune System

Mass cytometry, or CyTOF (cytometry by time-of-flight), is a variation of flow cytometry in which antibodies are labeled with heavy metal ions (in the case of Dr. Krieg’s experiments -- with rare metals), rather than fluorochromes, and then time-of-flight mass spectrometry is used for readout.

Basically, Dr. Krieg used this approach to stain cells using rare metal-conjugated antibodies that target surface and intracellular proteins to visualize what was happening on a cellular level. After staining, the cells are ionized using an inductively-coupled plasma. The ions derived from each stained cell are then detected in a mass spectrometer.

According to Dr. Krieg, this technique can potentially identify up to 100 markers per cell, but practically speaking, results on around 40 markers are more realistic to achieve.