Abstract
B lymphocytes possess immunoglobulin (Ig) receptors that can specifically bind antigen. The ultimate consequence of this binding is induction of specific antibody synthesis. It was clear since long that interaction of antigen with Ig receptors alone could not be responsible for B cell activation, because two types of antigens existed; thymus-inde-pendent antigens that could directly activate B cells and thymus-dependent antigens that by themselves failed to trigger B cells, but could do so in the presence of T cells. Obviously, properties of the antigen molecules themselves were of great importance for their ability to activate B cells. Before 1972 antibody synthesis could only be induced by the injection of antigen to animals or by the addition of antigen to cells in vitro and therefore an analysis of the mechanism of activation could not easily be carried out. However, in 1972 it was for the first time found that antibody synthesis could be induced by substances that did not in any way interact with the variable regions of the Ig receptors (1). The first substance with this property was lipopolysaccharides (LPS) from gram negative bacteria, but now the list of such substances is very long (5). LPS induced polyclonal antibody synthesis of all detectable specificities in a large subset of B lymphocytes.
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© 1979 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Möller, G. (1979). Mechanism of B Lymphocyte Activation. In: Bruni, C., Doria, G., Koch, G., Strom, R. (eds) Systems Theory in Immunology. Lecture Notes in Biomathematics, vol 32. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-93130-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-93130-7_1
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