| Welcome to BioLegend's Multicolor Panel Selector! This tool is designed to help you find the right products for your multicolor flow cytometry experiments. View the detailed instructions for using the Panel Selector and guidelines for constructing an optimized panel below. View Tutorial Here...
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| 1. Selecting Antibodies |
- Choose your antibody formats that you will use for your panel. Selecting any laser will automatically fill all available formats for that laser. If you are unsure of which fluorophores are available for your instrument, check your flow cytometer manual, view our Instrument Guide page, or check with your flow cytometry core facility.
- Select Human, Mouse, or Rat reactivity.
- Type in your desired specificities. As you type, a menu of matching specificities will display to the left. You are required to select from the popup menu of specificities in order to find products. The specificity menu displays CD molecule names rather than common names. To view common names of the menu items, just mouse over the specificity. If you are still unsure of the correct CD name, use our search to confirm the CD name.
- When you are ready click Find Products. You can also add specificities at any time by typing in the new specificity and click "Find Products".
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| 2. Constructing Your Panel |
- The results will display all available products for the desired specificities and formats indicated by the purple
 icon.
- To help with panel construction, we indicate the relative Brightness Index for each fluorophore in parentheses. Use this to help select brighter fluorophores for weakly expressed antigens and dimmer fluorophores for highly expressed antigens.
- To view available products, click on the icon. We have included a button to view fluorophore emission spectra information for each laser excitation to assist in selecting antibody formats.
- Select any product from the pop-up menu. Warnings will appear in a new window if there are potential issues.
- Selected products will appear below in the Panel Items list. For your convenience, selected items will be check-marked, while the column and row
 icons turn gray to indicate that these have already been selected for the panel.
- To preview data for your selected product, click on the purple Preview icon next to the selected product.
- If your desired format is not available, you can request a custom conjugation.
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| 3. Editing Your Panel and Shopping Cart |
- To remove products from your panel, click the red
 icon. If you want to remove all the items from your panel, click the "Clear Panel Items" button.
- If you are ready to add the panel items to your shopping cart, press the "Add Panel to Shopping Cart" button. (Note that the mouse-over cart tab in the top navigation will not be updated at this time, even though the items are in your cart. You will need to follow the indicated link to view your cart.)
- If you would like to clear all the items in your shopping cart, press the "Clear Shopping Cart" button.
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| 4. Saving, Sharing, and Printing Panels |
- In order to save, share, or print a panel, you must have selected at least one fluorophore choice for a specificity. This will populate a row of buttons below the Panel Items section and above the Instructions for Use section.
- To save your panel, press the “Save Panel” button. This will generate a button called “Email Link”. This allows you to easily share or email your pre-constructed panel. Note that if you modify the panel or make changes, you should save the panel to create a new link.
- To print, press the "Print Panel" button.
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Constructing multicolor panels for flow cytometry can be a challenging task. Follow these guidelines and recommendations to achieve optimized panels.
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- Know your instrument and the fluorophores that you can use. To find more information, check your cytometer manual, view our Instrument Guide page, or check with your local flow core facility.
- Use the Brightness Index, which is our relative indicator of fluorescence intensity above the background for each fluorophore, 1=dim, 5=brightest. On the panel constructor tool, we indicate this in parentheses next to each fluorophore.
- When selecting antibodies follow these general rules:
- Choose the brightest fluorophores that can be used on your instrument. In our Brightness Index chart, the brightest fluorophores are Brilliant Violet 421™, PE, and APC, so these should considered first.
- Choose the brightest fluorophore for your least expressed protein and the dimmest fluorophore for your most highly expressed protein. To help you, we have compiled a chart to indicate the expression of common surface molecules on blood cells. Generally, molecules like CD45, CD3, CD4, and CD8 are quite highly expressed on their target cell types and can be used quite successfully with dim fluorophores.
- Choose fluorophores with emissions having the least spectral overlap. For example, although Brilliant Violet 421™ and Pacific Blue™ do not have exact the same emission spectra, they did have significant overlap, so you should generally avoid using these together. For each laser, you can preview the emission spectra for the available fluorophores using the Emission button to the right of the panel selector. You can also use our Spectra Analyzer to view excitation and emission spectra.
- Use tandems (PE/Cyanine5, PE/Cyanine7, APC/Cyanine7) with caution, as they are more susceptible to degradation by light exposure or fixation. They are essential to large multicolor panels, so just use them with care to prevent light exposure and use appropriate fixation buffers and protocols.
- When constructing the panel, choose your specificities with the fewest format options first and specificities with the most options last.
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Our technical service team is also available to help with any questions you may have on panel construction or selecting antibodies.
Technical Service
Phone Toll-Free (US & Canada)1-877-273-3103
Phone (International): 1-858-768-5801
Email: Click Here
For a complete listing of the trademarks and patents referenced on this page, click here.
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