Manual antibody cocktailing in high-dimensional flow cytometry often introduces user-to-user variability and consumes valuable hands-on time. This study evaluated an automated workflow using the Curiox C-FREE™ Pluto Workstation for antibody cocktailing, benchmarking it against manual methods across 10- and 24-color panels.
Results showed that:
Reproducibility improved: Replicate cocktail variation consistently stayed below 5%.
Data quality maintained: Stain Index values were comparable or superior to manual prep across lymphocyte and myeloid subsets.
Efficiency increased: Hands-on time dropped from over 24 minutes manually to ~16 minutes with automated prep.
Workflow flexibility: Automated prep also enabled reproducible scaling of panels, FMO, and single-color controls with no extra pipetting.
By combining automated antibody cocktailing with centrifuge-less processing, Pluto enables fully automated immunostaining pipelines that enhance consistency, traceability, and speed in immunophenotyping workflows.
