Spectracular: minimizing spectral overlap in multicolor flow cytometry experiments

Abstract Designing multicolor antibody panels for flow cytometry is complex and time-consuming. Poorly designed panels can result in repeated rounds of optimization and irreproducible results due to spectral overlap between fluorochromes. However, few tools exist to help researchers when designing panels, and none automatically considers spectral overlap. Here we present Spectracular, a web server which utilizes a complexity optimization algorithm to suggest fluorochrome combinations with minimal or near-minimal spectral overlap. Spectracular is available at https://biosurf.org/spectracular.html .