
You can have as many ranged gates as you wish, and they can overlap each other. It is often helpful to stagger ranged gates so that you can see how many you have and what they refer to (see the example above). You can adjust histogram gates in the vertical column by selecting the desired gate, scrolling over the gate until the hand cursor appears and then moving the gate up or down. Set the gate by releasing the mouse button. While the cursor is displayed as a hand, click and hold down the mouse button and drag the gate to a new location. The cursor will change from an arrow to a hand. To move the gate without adjusting the width, first select the gate and move your cursor towards the middle of the gate. If you need to reset the width of a gate, simply select the gate, mouse over the left or right gate boundary (indicated by a black square) and move it to the left or the right. FlowJo will then prompt you for a gate name (“Ranged gate 1” in my case). The gate will be set when you release the mouse button. Click and drag the mouse simultaneously to set the width of the gate. To set a ranged gate, click on the ranged gate tool and move your mouse into the display area.

Ranged gates allow you to set a 2 point line as a gate anywhere on the display.

There are two options: ranged gates or a bisector tool. The gating tools available to histogram displays are available in the upper left side of the Graph Window. The left palette controls the histogram tint, the right will change the background color. To change the color of the background (default is white) or the tint of the histogram (gray is the default), simply mouse over the color palette squares (see below) and click once. It is important to note that the nature of flow cytometry data. You can then set the upper bounds of the axis units to your desired max (shown above as 2000). To set these limits, use the Graph Window and open the Options drop down menu (above) and from the Y Axis drop down select Manual. The default is to have FlowJo determine the optimal limits. You can manually set the lower and upper limits on the Y axis. The Y-axis for histograms is the number of cells/events falling within each “bin” of the histogram there are 256 bins for each histogram which correspond to 256 pixels of display space. This can be done in the FlowJo Layout Editor.įluorescence intensity is displayed on the X-axis (divided into 256 bins) and the count of events in each fluorescence channel is displayed on the Y-axis. Normalizing plots to unit area is good for comparison purposes. It is important to show the frequency or count of the population in a table or on the plot. *Remember that peak height is a function of the CV (spread) and number of events, so histogram displays can be misleading. (Open Options in the Graph Window and uncheck smooth to show unsmoothed). Below are the same data-set shown with and without smoothing. The histograms can be smoothed (by default) or unsmoothed this option has little effect when more than a few thousand events are in the gate. Histogram Options: Smoothing, Scaling and Color See the sections below for more information about histogram options and gating tools. In contrast to dot plots or other bivariate displays, there are different types of options and gating tools for histograms. 7-AAD) was used during staining, you can quickly evaluate whether you have high or low numbers of live cells (live cells will be largely 7-AAD negative). This can be helpful to quickly analyze whether your samples have normal, uniform, bimodal, or other type of distribution. Histograms display a frequency distribution of the data versus fluorescence intensity or some other parameter (e.g. Use histograms to view frequency distribution of your flow data, one parameter at a time. To view your plot as a histogram, simply click the drop-down menu on the left side of the Graph Window and select “Histogram” from the menu. FlowJo v10 makes it easy to convert bivariate dot plots to univariate histograms with a click of a button!
