摘要：A next step to interpret the findings generated by genome-wide association studies is to associate
molecular quantitative traits with disease-associated alleles. To this end, researchers are linking disease
risk alleles with gene expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL). However, gene expression at the
mRNA level is only an intermediate trait and flow cytometry analysis can provide more downstream
and biologically valuable protein level information in multiple cell subsets simultaneously using freshly
obtained samples. Because the throughput of flow cytometry is currently limited, experiments may
need to span over several weeks or months to obtain a sufficient sample size to demonstrate genetic
association. Therefore, normalisation methods are needed to control for technical variability and compare
flow cytometry data over an extended period of time. We show how the use of normalising
fluorospheres improves the repeatability of a cell surface CD25-APC mean fluorescence intensity phenotype
on CD4
