Study of CTL and LAK contacts to target cells after treatment with mitomycin C and adriamycin

We tried to understand the role of Mitomycin C and Adriamycin in the increased killing of target cells by Cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) and lymphokine activated killers (LAK). For this purpose, we used an objective method allowing quantitative evaluation of the roughness of cell contours on electron micrographs. We compared the folding of the membranes of LAK and CTL as well as conjugated targets exposed to different treatments. We demonstrated first that CTL and LAK displayed similar morphological patterns: the killer cells were more villous than targets in the free areas, and second that the former cells exhibited significant smoothing on the areas of contact with these targets. These results suggest that the binding process (as distinct from the recognition step) is dependent on killer properties which are the same in CTL, LAK and probably NK cells.