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  • WHERE I WORK

Sorting chloroplasts, pollen grains and coffee grounds

Flow-cytometry manager Armando Pacheco describes how he helps researchers to plan experiments that involve categorizing and counting individual cells.
  1. Amber Dance

    1. Amber Dance is a freelance writer in Los Angeles, California.

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Armando Pacheco wears a face mask as he poses for a portrait in a lab room containing a fume hood and computer on a trolly

Armando Pacheco is the operator for fluorescence-activated cell sorting at the Cornell University Institute of Biotechnology’s Flow Cytometry Facility in Ithaca, New York. Credit: Jesse Winter for Nature

Let’s say you wanted to sort people according to the colours they have dyed their hair. You could line them all up, single file, and send those with blue hair to one spot, undyed hair to another, and so on.

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Nature 585, 152 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02500-4

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