ANALYZING SUBPOPULATIONS WITH WELL-LEVEL AND CELL-LEVEL APPROACHES

Using the simple example shown, treatment of the cell population induces two new subpopulations to emerge in a population of cells.

Analysis at the well-level (upper panel) using either a plate reader or by imaging and averaging the cell level data results in an average value with a relatively high degree of noise.

Cell-level analysis produces data for each cell within the well. This can be a powerful approach especially when dealing with low incidence phenotypes within a population. However, this approach leads to very large amounts of meta-data since each cell object may have several hundred numerical descriptors.