Hi all,
I went back to the CyTOF1 manual, and the main instance of "time" in the parameters was in Settling time, which had units of Milliseconds (as Zach proposed).
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Going back to the original 2009 Bandura et al paper that describes the CyTOF1:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac901049w"A trigger delay (9000 ns) and the recording segment length (3072 ns) are set to allow digitization of the segment of the signal that corresponds to m/z = 125−215, with 1 ns sampling resolution.
In a typical cell analysis experiment, 2 min of raw data (∼28 GB) is recorded as a single continuous record, containing all 9 216 000 single spectral segments (3072 ns long each) generated during the 2 min.
A typical mass spectrum for m/z = 136−176 for the integral of 40 000 spectra (0.52 s acquisition time) for a sample of all (natural abundance) lanthanides at 20 pg/mL is shown in Figure 3.
For cell/particle analysis, the first stage of processing of the raw data record comprises integration of user-selected mass channels within each single spectrum, compressing the data by a factor of 3072/2N, where N is the number of selected mass channels (2 Bytes of data for each). When 30 mass channels are selected, the resulting compression factor is ∼50. The resulting files (typically <1 GB) contain “per spectrum” analog, pseudopulse, and dual data for the selected masses. Raw data for the beads shown in Figure 4 were collected for 120 s in high-resolution mode, and the data for each spectrum for m/z = 159, 165, and 169 were integrated within 16 ns-long integration windows, starting from ∼3% peak height. The resultant per-mass data for each of the first 64 000 consecutive spectra are shown in Figure 5.
Presumably those numbers relate to the IMD file, not the FCS file....I couldn't find any specific numbers for FCS writing. Since the FCS file is for the cell events, not the pushes like for the IMD, the "Time" has to be different.....
Mike