Different human hematopoetic cell lines, susceptible or resistant to NK lysis, conjugate identically to non-adherent peripheral blood lymphocytes.
As earlier work had suggested the presence of subpopulations in the human natural killer (NK) cell system the present study was undertaken to investigate if such subpopulations could be defined by estimating target binding cells (TBCs) in agarose. The TBC assay was modified to allow competitive binding between two different target cells, one of which was labelled with carboxyfluoresceindiacetate. In addition, variation in TBC numbers between different donors, and the relationship between conjugating ability and NK susceptibility of different hematopoetic cell lines was investigated. It was found that all ten human hematopoetic suspension type cell lines conjugated to the same identical subpopulation among non-adherent peripheral blood cells even if they varied markedly with regard to NK susceptibility. Cells from individual donors were consequently found to show a similar TBC value against all tested cell lines even if TBC values varied between different donors. Adherently growing cell lines from different tissues could only partly adsorb NK cells conjugating to hematopoetic cell lines.
D000327:Adsorption; D001667:Binding, Competitive; D002448:Cell Adhesion; D002460:Cell Line; D003602:Cytotoxicity, Immunologic; D006413:Hematopoietic System / Q000276:immunology*; D006801:Humans; D066298:In Vitro Techniques; D007694:Killer Cells, Natural / Q000276:immunology*; D008214:Lymphocytes / Q000276:immunology*