Marine phytoplankton produce about half of the Earth's oxygen and organic carbon, playing a key role in global cycles. Flow cytometry allows researchers to analyze individual phytoplankton cells, estimating their size, pigment content, and other properties. Identifying specific subpopulations through data gating is crucial for understanding phytoplankton distribution and responses to environmental changes, but manual analysis struggles with the vast data generated, like the SeaFlow project’s 800 billion cell dataset.

This project used a kernel-smoothed EM algorithm to gate the phytoplankton smoothly over time. Please click the following links for full descriptions of our model for this data and our method.

A copy of a poster presented at 2024 CBIOMES Annual Meeting can be found below: