LIVE-OR-DYE™

Live-or-Dye™ Advantages

Live-or-Dye™ staining is extremely stable and is compatible with intracellular staining protocols without interference with immunostaining.

• Wide selection of 14 dye colors for easy panel design
• Exceptionally bright dyes for excellent live/dead separation
• Withstands fixation and permeabilization
• No loss of brightness after fixation
• For flow cytometry or fluorescence microscopy
• Dyes designed to fit gaps in spectral flow panels
• The most options for the 633 nm and 808 nm lasers
• Trial sizes and sampler kits available

Spectral flow cytometry is a rapidly growing technology with significantly enhanced multiplexing capabilities over conventional flow cytometry. Where conventional flow cytometer instruments can detect panels with more than a dozen fluorophores, spectral flow cytometers can accommodate panels with upwards of 40 dyes. Biotium offers spectrally unique Live-or-Dye™ stains designed specifically to take advantage of enhanced multiplexing by spectral flow ctyometry.

Live-or-Dye™ Stains for Spectral Flow

Learn more about spectral flow cytometry and our high-performance CF® dyes developed to fill emission gaps between available fluorophores.

Live-or-Dye™ stains are available in two sampler kits, each containing five different dye colors, for excitation from all of the popular flow cytometry laser lines (see Live-or-Dye™ Sampler Kits table below). The Live-or-Dye™ Sampler Kit, Standard (32016) was designed for use on the most common flow cytometer laser and filter configurations, with dyes excitable by UV, Violet, Blue, Yellow-Green, and Red lasers. The Live-or-Dye™ Sampler Kit, Spectral (32017) was designed for use in spectral scanning flow cytometry. It contains dyes excitable by UV, Violet, Blue, and Red lasers, all of which have been validated on the Cytek® Aurora spectral cytometer, and chosen for their ability to fill the gaps in many spectral flow panels.

It is often very useful to identify dead cells for microscopic analysis as well, particularly when performing live-cell imaging experiments. In microscopy, live/dead stains allow unambiguous visual discrimination of dead cells. Live-or-Dye™ Fixable Viability Staining Kits are bright and photostable dyes that work just as well for microscopy as they do for flow cytometry, with negligible signal in live cells and strong signal in dead cells (Fig. 5).

Four stains have been validated for fluorescence microscopy. The other  dyes are expected to work as well, as long as the microscope has the appropriate excitation and emission settings.

Live-or-Dye™ Stains validated for fluorescence microscopy

Live-or-Dye NucFix™ Red is a unique, cell membrane impermeable dye that specifically stains the nuclei of dead cells.

Unlike other commonly used nuclear stains such as propidium iodide (PI) or DRAQ7™, Live-or-Dye NucFix™ labeling is covalent, so the dye doesn’t transfer between cells after fixation. Live-or-Dye NucFix™ Red can be used for flow cytometry or fluorescence microscopy (Fig. 6).

The Yeast Live-or-Dye™ Live/Dead Staining Kit combines a cell-permeant green dye, Thiazole Orange, which concentrates in the nucleus of live cells, with Live-or-Dye™ 568/583 (Fig. 7). Co-staining with the two dyes allows live/dead discrimination of yeast by fluorescence microscopy or flow cytometry.