What's new in the lymphocyte phenotype?

It is a relatively short period of time since the demonstration of surface immunoglobulin by immunofluorescence and the technique of cell surface rosetting first enabled in the identification of lymphocyte subsets. When we now examine the range of monoclonal antibodies which are available to lineage specific and lineage related epitopes the early methods used for the characterisation of normal or abnormal lymphocyte populations seem amazingly crude. The initial development by Kohler and Millstein of techniques for hybridising antibody producing cells to establish continuous lines and their development by large numbers of workers worldwide have provided a vast array of reagents available for cell phenotyping, ranging from the simplest diagnostic determinations to the sophisticated analysis of lymphocyte subsets in development. Indeed, so great is the array of monoclonal antibodies available that the nomenclature has been standardised at four international workshops. The basic aim of these workshops has been to establish a standardised system for the identification of the different monoclonal antibodies available for staining lymphocytes and also to officially allocate antibodies to these groups. A wide range of techniques are employed by the many groups who contribute to these workshops in order to achieve these results. Despite these basic aims, it is also clear that a considerable amount of functional and molecular biological information has come from these large group studies. At the Oxford Workshop, held in 1986, the number of identified "Clusters of Differentiation" (CD) reached the figure 45.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)