Welcome to the Mass Cytometry Core Facility at UNC

The Mass Cytometry Core offers comprehensive expertise and support to enable successful mass cytometry experiments. The core provides assistance with mass cytometry panel design, protocol support, antibody procurement, data acquisition and basic support for single cell data analysis in Cytobank.
The facility is open to all UNC clinical and scientific researchers as well as to external universities and commercial researchers.

Mass Cytometry combines elements from flow cytometry and inductively-coupled plasma mass spectroscopy. Also called CyTOF (for time-of-flight cytomety), this powerful new technology enables massive multiparametric analysis of single cell suspensions to investigate cellular responses in heterogeneous populations. Cells are stained with 35 or more antibody probes that are each coupled to unique transition elements and lanthanides.
The presence and abundance of the metal tags on surface epitopes and intracellular markers of individual cells are used to understand cell responses such as cytokine production, phosphoprotein signaling, or nuclear antigen expression in such complex and heterogeneous populations as hematopoietic and cancer cells.