title: Chemiluminescence and lymphocyte proliferation: parallelism in collaboration between subpopulations of thymus cells for both types of responses.
abstract: Rat thymocytes respond to exposure to phytomitogens by oxidant generation as detected by chemiluminescence in presence of luminol. Maximal chemiluminescent response to a wide variety of plant lectins was obtained only after the cells had been incubated for 18 hours at 37 degrees C but not at 4 degrees C. This temperature dependence and the necessity for intact protein-and RNA-synthetic machinery during the incubation period indicate the occurrence of differentiation of thymocytes as they develop the capacity for chemiluminescent response. Furthermore, adherent-phagocytic cells play an essential collaborative role during this differentiation. A remarkable parallelism was shown to exist in the capacity of a cell subset to respond to concanavalin A by DNA synthesis and the ability of the same subset to respond by chemiluminescence. The latest-sedimenting small lymphocytes after velocity sedimentation of thymus cells develop the capacity for DNA-synthetic as well as chemiluminescent responses to concanavalin A only if allowed to collaborate with a population of early-sedimenting adherent-phagocytic cells.
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002448:Cell Adhesion; D002454:Cell Differentiation; D002469:Cell Separation; D004247:DNA / Q000096:biosynthesis; D005260:Female; D008163:Luminescent Measurements; D008213:Lymphocyte Activation; D010586:Phagocytes / Q000166:cytology; D051381:Rats; D011917:Rats, Inbred Lew; D013601:T-Lymphocytes / Q000145:classification* / Q000166:cytology; D013950:Thymus Gland / Q000166:cytology
chemical_list: D004247:DNA