Cyt‐Geist: Current and Future Challenges in Cytometry: Reports of the CYTO 2018 Conference Workshops

Organized by the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC), the CYTO conference is one of the most important events for everyone interested in cytometry and quantitative single cell analysis. It is an annual assembly of cytometry experts as well as novices in this field—all having one common denominator—passion for cytometry. This meeting is not only unique possibility to learn new, exciting cutting‐edge research directly from the source by attending the Frontiers and the State‐Of‐The‐Art lectures, research, and technology sessions, or Tutorials.<br />CYTO conferences are also the best possible live forum to discuss current and emerging challenges in cytometry associated sciences at the utmost interactive CYTO formats—the Workshops. The Workshops attract a lot of attention within and outside the cytometry community as they generally discuss where we stand in specific fields of interest, how problems can be addressed and solved, and what are the future development areas and demands. Due to limited time frame allocated to this format; however, the workshops are run in parallel so sometimes attendees cannot participate in all the workshops of their interest. Moreover, those who could have not join the CYTO conference miss the content entirely. Therefore, we decided to summarize all the workshops to disseminate the information provided and the state‐of‐the art view of the community. Thus, the main reason for creating such combined summary of reports was to keep the record of the live discussions and main conclusions as well as to propose eventual guidelines and make them available to the broader public.<br />This manuscript serves as a summary report of 16 workshops (WS) that were held at CYTO2018 in Prague. We present in concise form the current and the future challenges in cytometry identified by workshop organizers. The manuscript is divided into four topic chapters: Trends, Shared Resource Laboratory (SRL) Best Practices, Quality Assurance and Reproducibility, and Technology. Each chapter is a summary of four workshops. We intend to serve with this joint workshop report the global community involved in single cell analysis and cytometry.