Negative enrichment of bovine T lymphocytes with monoclonal antibodies and magnetic microspheres.

A highly enriched population of bovine T lymphocytes was produced from peripheral blood leukocytes following the depletion of monoclonal antibody-labelled B lymphocytes and monocytes with magnetic microspheres. This negative-enrichment protocol was simple, rapid, and specific. Also, it had a high recovery efficiency and was consistently reproducible. The enriched T lymphocytes proliferated in response to recombinant bovine interleukin 2 and, following the addition of monocytes, to concanavalin A. This methodology made it possible to determine the proliferative responses of peripheral blood lymphocytes utilizing a constant number of T lymphocytes within each assay. In this way, the in vitro T lymphocyte responses were determined independent of changes in the number of responder cells within peripheral blood.