Qiu, P. et al. Nat. Biotechnol. 29, 886–891 (2011).

Despite recent great technical advances in flow cytometry (allowing up to 17 single-cell parameters to be measured) and mass cytometry (allowing up to 30 or more parameters to be detected), methods for analyzing such high-dimensional single-cell data have lagged behind. Qiu et al. now describe an analysis method called spanning-tree progression analysis of density-normalized events (SPADE). SPADE enables the visualization of cellular progressions and hierarchies in a branched-tree structure.