Commercial cell standards?
What has been your result with using commercial cell standards in CyTOF?
At CYTO 2016, Biolegend was promoting their new Veri-cell lyophilized PBMCs. They had a poster on it as well, and their example data looked good.
So, I tried my live PBMC surface phenotyping panel on Biolegend Veri-cells and Beckman-Coulter Cyto-trols, along with a bunch of my standard control PBMCs. Note: the commercial standards are all pre-fixed in some fashion, while the control PBMCs were stained as thawed live cells. I have attached PDF layouts from FlowJo for comparison (one live control vs both commercial controls).
Overall, while running, the Biolegend Veri-cells seemed better than Beckman-Coulter Cyto-trols: less background, somewhat better staining even on some more sensitive markers. However, since they were fixed, of course there were still some differences compared to the live control.
One thing that puzzled me about BIolegend's poster at CYTO was that they showed phospho unstim/stim results. By email, Biolegend has told me that you can get custom Veri-cells made, where you could get an unstim and a stim of your choice (LPS, PMA, etc). Since they're fixed, this is probably most applicable to phosphoflow standards. And one caveat is that, unlike a live control which you stim and fix alongside your other samples, Veri-cells wouldn't be a control for whether your stim/fix worked. But as a commercial reference (even just as a way to consistently validate your antibodies), I think they could be useful.
Mike