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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Front. Immunol.
Sec. Systems Immunology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1481412

Unique Gating Strategy Identifier based on the Prime Population System and Gödel Numbers

Provisionally accepted
Antonio Cosma Antonio Cosma *
  • Luxembourg Institute of Health, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Gating is a fundamental and essential process in cytometry data analysis since it defines cell types of interest. Currently, there is no universally accepted method for representing and sharing gating strategies among software, publications, and repositories. I propose using the Prime Population system combined with a modified version of Gödel Numbers to identify any gating strategy uniquely.The Prime Population System is first used to identify gates on bivariate plots; successively, Gödel Numbers are used to set the sequence of the hierarchical gating strategy. The process results are unique identifiers for any existing and future gating strategy. The unique identifiers hold since according to the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, every natural number other than one either is a prime or is a product of prime numbers, and every nonprime number can be factored into a product of prime in only one way. This method represents a further step towards the arithmetization of cytometry metadata.

    Keywords: Cytometry, prime numbers, database, ontology, Gating strategy

    Received: 15 Aug 2024; Accepted: 30 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Cosma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Antonio Cosma, Luxembourg Institute of Health, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.