Measurement of proliferative responses of cultured lymphocytes.

Measurement of proliferative responses of human lymphocytes is a fundamental technique for the assessment of their biological responses to various stimuli. Most simply, this involves measurement of the number of cells present in a culture before and after the addition of a stimulating agent. This unit contains several different prototype protocols to measure the proliferation response of lymphocytes following exposure to mitogens, antigens, allogeneic or autologous cells, or soluble factors. Each of these protocols can be used in conjunction with an accompanying support protocol which contains methods for pulsing cultures with [(3)H]thymidine and determining incorporation of [(3)H]thymidine into DNA. The protocols described here provide an estimate of DNA synthesis and cell proliferation in an entire cell population, but do not provide information on the proliferation of individual cells.