Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2012
The measurement of CFSE dilution by flow cytometry is a powerful experimental tool tomeasure lymphocyte proliferation. CFSE fluorescence precisely halves after each celldivision in a highly predictable manner and is thus highly amenable to mathematicalmodelling. However, there are several biological and experimental conditions that canaffect the quality of the proliferation data generated, which may be important to considerwhen modelling dye dilution data sets. Here we overview several of these variablesincluding the type of fluorescent dye used to monitor cell division, dye labellingmethodology, lymphocyte subset differences, in vitro versus in vivo experimental assays,cell autofluorescence, and dye transfer between cells.