Forces and flow

Compiling data sets in flow cytometry is highly problematic because there is huge technical variability within reagents, instruments and experiments, and no centralized database of the type available in genomics. The burden is arguably highest in immunology, which relies heavily on the technology. Now, researchers at Stanford University have drawn on the growing trove of multiplexed flow cytometry data to build a software platform that creates reference maps of the immune system.

The platform, published last month in Science, is based on force-directed graphs, which are visually intuitive representations of the degrees of similarity between data subsets...