Cell analysis and lab imaging are the laboratory instruments that count and sort cells, measure hundreds of small samples at once, and photograph cells under a microscope. Biologists use them to see how cells respond to a possible new medicine, long before the medicine is tested in people.
There are three main kinds. A flow cytometer counts cells. It pushes cells in a liquid past a laser, one at a time, thousands every second. Each cell has been marked with coloured dyes that stick to certain proteins. The cytometer measures each cell's colour, and so counts how many cells of each type the sample contains. Some cytometers can also sort the cells into separate tubes.
A plate reader measures many samples at once. A plate is a flat plastic tray with many small wells, usually 96 or 384. Each well holds a tiny sample. The plate reader shines light into every well and measures the light that comes back, such as the glow of a dye that only living cells give off. A microscope, or a high-content imager, takes photographs of the cells in each well. Software then measures the size, shape and number of the cells in every photograph.
Consider a cancer research laboratory in Pune that is testing 380 possible new compounds. A robot puts cancer cells into every well of a 384-well plate. It adds one compound to each well, and leaves four wells untreated for comparison. Two days later, the plate reader measures the glow of the living cells. In 12 wells, the glow has fallen by more than half, so those compounds have killed many cancer cells. The imager then photographs the cells in those 12 wells, to see how they died. The laboratory chooses three compounds for further tests.
The robots that fill the plates are described in liquid handling robots. The results go to the laboratory's other systems through lab instrument integration. The images and counts are stored on a bioinformatics data platform, where discovery teams and AI models can use them.
These instruments are also used to make biologics. For example, a factory may count the cells in a bioreactor every day. When plate readers, imagers and robots are linked and directed by an AI model, the laboratory becomes a self-driving lab.