Flow cytometry describes a process whereby single biological cells stained with fluorescent dyes pass rapidly in single file through one or more focused laser beams. Scattered light and one or more fluorescence detectors capture signals from each cell and store the data as the equivalent of a row in a spreadsheet. Hundreds of thousands of these rows make up a Flow Cytometry Standard (FCS) file ready for analysis. These files are commonly called list mode files. The FCSRead app reads FCS3.0 and FCS3.1 list mode files and displays univariate and bivariate histograms chosen by the user. Gates can be set on peaks in the histograms and the list mode data gated to show correlations among the peaks in the histograms. Gate types include rectangular, elliptical, polygon, and quadrants.

FCSRead is written in Swift 5 for MacOS 10.12 or later.

Both the user manual and the software description are PDF files in the Data Group

There are two artificially generated .fcs data files (3.1) in the Data Group