Ms. Kunze,
At the present time if you wanted to do a tetramer assay you'd
have to know someone! You couldn't simply do the assay because
the tetramer reagents are not presently widely available nor are they
of sufficient enough scope to cover all potential scenario's. That is to
say you would have to make the reagents yourself - that you could do,
but your message sounded as if you thought there might be a kit which
there isn't yet.
Prior to tetramer technology if you wanted to follow the T cells that were
specifically responding to a particular antigen you used adoptive transfer
in which a T cell specific for a given antigen was added back to a system
and identified by a clonal marker or you used a SCID transgenic in which
only a single T cell receptor specificity was present.
Clearly once the knowledge of how T cells interacted with APC's physically,
was realized in 1987 scientists recognized that you could employ processed
peptide bound to MHC to seek out and identify responding T cells but the
physical chemistry hadn't been resolved well enough to use them
(MHC+peptide)
as markers for T cells.
All I can tell you is that a large part of the problem was increasing the
avidity
and that was achieved by moving to a tetrameric complex in which 4
MHC-peptide
biotinylated groups are bound to an avidin molecules 4 binding sites to make
a complex
that can bind specific T cells strongly.
Gene/UCONN Health
----------
From: Elaine Kunze
To: cyto-inbox
Subject: tetramer assay??
Date: Monday, April 26, 1999 10:54AM
One of my faculty came back from a meeting saying "All the immunologist do
a tetramer assay for antigen presenting cells."
I feel silly but I never heard of this and didn't find anything after a
quicky look at Current protocols and a few other generic sources. Can
anyone provide a reference and or explanation?
****************************************************************************
Elaine Kunze
Flow Cytometry.....Image Analysis...
The Biotechnology Institute for Research and Education
Life Sciences Consortium
8B Althouse Laboratory (814-863-2762)
Penn State University
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