It has been several months since you heard from the Cytkit project. We have been busy. Back in June, we showed off an open source cytometer hardware design with low-cost optics. But there was no software or electronics: if you wanted to set one up for yourself, you’d have to provide your own detector, oscilloscope and data analysis software. We have been working hard – the software is now built (in a “beta” form) and the electronics design (analogue detector boards and digital data acquisition and instrument control) is nearly ready. Our instrument kit pre-order is coming soon, but bear with us – it is a lot of work to make sure this is ready to launch as a product. In the meantime, we will be releasing our open source cytometry acquisition and analysis software application: Honeychrome.

Honeychrome

For too long, our field has lacked a general purpose, free and open-source cytometry software package. We intend to plug that gap and provide a software package that is useful for everybody: power cytometrists, biologists, students, innovators. The app should be lightweight but provide all the functions one expects: 

• acquire data (starting with Cytkit, perhaps with drivers for other instruments in the future)
• import FCS files from any instruments
• provide both conventional compensation and spectral unmixing
• give simple statistical comparisons between samples, publication quality graphs and exports
• be highly intuitive to use
• support the major operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux)

It should also be fully open source, and provide a platform that innovators can exploit, for developing both instrumentation and data analysis and visualisation techniques. (We intend to release a programmers guide too, so that people can build on the app easily.)

So… we’ve now completed an first version of the software, and hope you will find it useful! But before releasing it publicly, we are setting up a beta testers programme. Would you like to get early access to Honeychrome? If so, could you get in touch ASAP (contact us)?

We leave you with this teaser about what Honeychrome looks like and what it can do (here visualising data acquired by Oliver Burton on a Cytek Aurora for a previous Babraham Spectral Cytometry Symposium). 

Seasons greetings,

Samson & the Cytkit Team