Live-or-Dye™ Fixable Viability Staining Kits allow discrimination between live and dead cells by flow cytometry or microscopy. Live/dead stains are useful probes to include when analyzing cell surface protein expression by flow cytometry, because they allow intracellular fluorescence signal from dead cells with permeable plasma membranes to be excluded from analysis.

Biotium offers a wide selection of Live-or-Dye™ viability stains spanning the fluorescence spectrum, for maximal flexibility in multi-color analysis. Visit the Live-or-Dye™ Technology Page for more data and information.

How It Works

Live-or-Dye™ Fixable Viability Stains are cell membrane impermeant amine-reactive dyes. The dyes are able to enter into dead cells that have compromised membrane integrity and covalently label free amines on intracellular proteins. The dye labeling is extremely stable, allowing the cells to be fixed and permeabilized without loss of fluorescence or dye transfer between cells. The Live-or-Dye™ staining protocol has been optimized to maximize live/dead discrimination with minimal live cell staining, in order to prevent interference with immunostaining.

Biotium has a wide selection of Live-or-Dye™ viability stains spanning the fluorescence spectrum (see Table 1 below), for maximal flexibility in designing multi-color flow panels.

We also offer two sampler kits, each containing five different dye colors, for excitation from all of the popular flow cytometry laser lines (see Table 2 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.

Live-or-Dye™ Fixable Viability Stains are dead cell specific in all cell types, including mammalian cells, bacteria and yeast. See our Cellular Stains Table for more information on how our dyes stain various organisms.

Table 1: Single-Color Live-or-Dye™ Kits

Table 2: Live-or-Dye™ Sampler Kits

Biotium also offers the the ViaPlex™ 2-Color Cell Barcoding Kits for analyzing up to 15 samples in a single tube to save time and reagents, as well as ViaFluor® SE Cell Proliferation Kits for robust cell-division tracking with less toxicity than CFSE. Learn more about our products for flow cytometry.