Flow Cytometry Standard

The FCS specification has traditionally been developed and maintained by the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC).

An event is either an actual biological cell or some other mass that was large enough to trigger the data acquisition capturing device of the flow cytometer instrument.

Data segments hold the following layout: Each event is laid out according to the number of bytes described by $PnB for each parameter.

[2] Since then, FCS became the standard file format supported by all flow cytometry software and hardware vendors.

Changes included in FCS 3.1 address potential ambiguities in the previous versions and provide a more robust standard.

The major additions are support for preferred display scale, a standardized way of capturing the sample volume, information about the origins of the data file, and support for plate and well identification in high throughput, plate based experiments.