The Tufts Laser Cytometry (TLC) Core Facility is applying for funds to purchase a Bigfoot Spectral Cell Sorter (ThermoFisher Scientific). This instrument will be a critical acquisition, allowing TLC to maintain its mission of providing high-quality and up-to-date flow cytometry services to the research community within the extended Tufts University campus network. TLC was established in 1998 and has continued its status as the only Flow Cytometry Core facility at Tufts University ever since. TLC is an indispensable service provider to the science community. Its success in supporting high-impact NIH-funded research can be largely attributed to its outstanding and dedicated staff members, Mr. Allen Parmelee and Mr. Stephen Kwok, as well as the continuous institutional (financial) support. In the past two years, 53 laboratories used the Core's sorting service. The majority of them are NIH- funded, with several others actively seeking initial or renewed NIH funding. Researchers that rely on the TLC work in health- and life-sciences disciplines including immunology, microbiology & host-pathogen interaction, cellular & cancer biology, genetic & associated diseases, neurobiology & neurologic diseases, developmental biology, and aging. TLC currently offers its services via two suites of instrumentation. The Analytic instrument suite includes a FACSCalibur and an LSRII (both BD), along with a new Aurora Spectral Flow Cytometer (Cytek). The Sorter instrument suite includes a MoFlo, a legacy Influx with biosafety containment (both 15+ yrs old), and a Cytek customized BD FACSAria II (Cytek-Aria, 10+ yrs). The suite of Sorter instruments is outdated and increasingly unreliable. By the end of 2021, none of the current sorters in TLC will be serviceable by their vendors. To prevent interrupting the critical sorting service to NIH-funded users, a new cell sorter will be essential. The TLC team considered the current and anticipated needs of its users and both of our Suite' capabilities and determined that the Bigfoot Sorter is the only logical choice. Part of the decision-making process pivots on harmonizing the capabilities of Analytic and Sorter equipment already in the facility. For instance, the current Cytek-Aria compliments the specifications of the LSRII. This approach allows researchers to migrate experiments optimized on the analytic LSRII to the Cytek-Aria for cell sorting. Acquiring the Aurora analytic cytometer allowed users to capitalize on the cutting-edge technology of analytic cytometry with complexity comparable to the CyTOF (Mass Spectometry, but in a far more economical platform). The key features of the Bigfoot include: jet-in-air sorting; built-in, certified bio-containment; and is the only instrument with both “conventional” and “spectral” detection modes. This machine would allow the dovetailing of the analytic and sorting functionalities and reproduce the specifications of the facility's current sorters. It will advance state-of- the-art ...