The mission of the Flow Cytometry Shared Resource (also known as FACS) Facility is to provide state-of-the-art highly available flow cytometry and cell-sorting services to the Stanford research community. To fulfill this mission, the Facility maintains three cell sorters and four flow analyzers in the Beckman Center in the School of Medicine. Four full-time and seven part-time staff work in the Facility, providing quality control, maintenance and operation of these instruments, as well as user training and consultation on experimental design and data analysis. The staff embodies over 125 years of flow cytometry experience, including developing some of the major advances of the field, such as compensation, cloning and large numbers of measurement parameters. The Facility Faculty Advisor is also highly experienced with flow cytometry, having used it as a research tool and helped to develop new applications over a 15-year period. The Flow Cytometry Shared Resource Facility billed 10,094 hours for instrument use in 2008. This represented 389 users from 153 different laboratories at Stanford. Cancer Center members provide the majority of this use, representing 117 of the laboratories and logging 76% of the hours. The FY 2008-2009 budget is over $900,000 and is expected to grow as new instrumentation is added. Currently, instruments with greater capabilities are utilized at close to 100% capacity. To this end, a new high-end analyzer and cell sorter have recently been obtained. The future goals of the Facility include expanding its educational program and bringing in new technologies and instrumentation, in addition to continuing to providing the highest quality flow cytometry services to the Cancer Center.
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