How do your core facilities compare globally? Results from the 2021 International Microscopy and Flow Cytometry Surveys

By Jessica Back, Kirk Czymmek, Derek Davies, Peter O’Toole

How does your facility stack up against others around the world? How many instruments per staff member is typical? What does everyone charge for an assisted session on a cell sorter? These are questions that core facility managers and directors wrestle with constantly, often without any reliable benchmarks. To address this, we conducted two parallel international surveys — one focused on Flow Cytometry and one on Microscopy — capturing a broad snapshot of core facility operations in 2021. The results have now been published in the Journal of Microscopy:

• Flow Cytometry survey (148 respondents): Back et al., J. Microsc., 2026. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmi.70094
• Microscopy survey (241 respondents): Czymmek et al., J. Microsc., 2026. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmi.70097

Both datasets — anonymized and freely downloadable — are available alongside the papers for anyone who wants to dig deeper.

What did we find?

Responses came from facilities across three broad regions: The Americas, Europe & Africa, and Asia Pacific. Across both surveys, the similarities were often as striking as the differences.

Instruments and staffing. In Flow Cytometry facilities, most labs reported 11 or fewer instruments, averaging around 4.6 analyzers and 2.6 cell sorters, with spectral cytometry already making a notable appearance for such a recently introduced technology. In Microscopy, widefield and confocal systems dominated, but over 50% of respondents also reported hosting at least one form of electron microscopy, a reminder of how much consolidation is happening across platforms.

Staffing ratios varied across regions in both surveys. In Flow Cytometry, the global average was roughly one staff member per five instruments, though this ranged from about 1:3 in the Americas to 1:6–7 in Asia Pacific. The Microscopy survey showed a global average closer to 1:3 instruments per staff member, with the interesting exception of Asia Pacific, where a higher proportion of electron microscopes was associated with more dedicated staffing — not surprising given the technical demands of cryo-EM and FIB-SEM.

One striking difference between the two surveys stood out: only 24% of Flow Cytometry facility managers reported being able to pursue their own research alongside their service role, compared with 57% of Microscopy facility heads. We suspect this reflects a fundamentally different operational model, with flow facilities being more continuously driven by user-facing service demand.

Funding and fees. Both surveys found a global mix of institutional support, fee-for-service income, and grants. In Flow Cytometry, larger facilities with more staff tended to generate a greater proportion of income from fees. Microscopy facilities in the Americas and Asia Pacific showed a similar trend, while Europe & Africa showed the opposite, an increase in direct grant funding as staff numbers grew, possibly reflecting larger national centers operating outside a typical university cost-recovery model. On fees themselves, Europe tended to charge slightly less than the Americas for comparable assisted sessions across both instrument types.

Applications. The breadth of science happening inside these facilities is remarkable. In flow cytometry, cell phenotyping, functional assays, fluorescent protein studies, and DNA analysis dominated, with about half of respondents also engaged in small particle analysis, a rapidly growing area. In microscopy, FRAP, FRET, TIRF, clearing microscopy, and single-molecule techniques were all well represented, while the Americas showed higher uptake of newer methods like expansion microscopy. Across both surveys, virtually all facilities served mammalian cell biology, but many also worked with bacteria, yeast, plant material, and even inorganic particles.

The COVID-19 snapshot. Because the surveys wer conducted in 2020–2021, we included a dedicated section on pandemic impact. In Flow Cytometry and Microscopy alike, facilities in the Americas and Europe & Africa reported losing over 80% of their utilization during the initial lockdown period. Recovery was constrained by social distancing requirements limiting instrument access, though some facilities that had instruments in separate rooms fared better. These data may prove useful as a reference point for future disruptions.

Why does this matter?

Many core facilities operate without clear benchmarks. A manager negotiating for an additional staff member, or a director making the case to a funder for instrument replacement, is often doing so without knowing what peer institutions look like. These surveys are designed to change that, giving facilities concrete, regionally contextualized data to inform those conversations.

There are also some genuinely surprising findings worth sitting with. The low proportion of flow cytometry managers doing their own research, the rapid uptake of spectral cytometry, the high prevalence of electron microscopy even in light microscopy-focused facilities, and the regional divergence in funding models all point to a field that is more heterogeneous than it might appear from the inside.

What comes next?

These surveys are the first installment of a planned longitudinal series. The next round is scheduled for early 2027, and we want to involve the community both in refining the questions and in ensuring broader global participation, particularly from regions that were underrepresented this time around.

We also know the surveys weren’t perfect. Several questions could have been worded more clearly, and we missed some opportunities (for example, asking whether a flow facility also hosts microscopy, or vice versa). We’re actively working on improvements for the next round.

Here’s how you can get involved:

• Access the raw data — both anonymized datasets are freely available in the supplementary materials of each paper, and we encourage the community to mine them for correlations we haven’t reported.
• Contribute to the next survey — if you have questions you’d like to see included, or if you want to flag issues with how current questions are worded, please contact us at jessica.back@wayne.edu for flow cytometry or peter.otoole@york.ac.uk for microscopy.
• Watch for the 2027 survey — we’ll be announcing it through this community and the usual listservs. The more facilities participate, the more useful the benchmarks become for everyone.

Whether you run a two-instrument flow lab in a clinical setting or a twenty-system multi-modal imaging center, these surveys are built to help you understand where you sit in the global landscape — and to give you data-backed arguments for the resources your facility needs.