Mechanisms of the adjuvant effect of nystatin on in vitro antibody response of mouse spleen cells: indication of nystatin as a B-cell mitogen and as a stimulant for polyclonal antibody synthesis in B cells.

Adjuvanticity of nystatin, one of the polyenic antifungal antibiotics having as its primary target the membrane sterol of eukaryotic cells, was investigated by examining its effect on several functions of mouse spleen cells relevant to immunological phenomena in vitro. Nystatin was found to stimulate significantly DNA synthesis in thymus-independent (B) cells but not in thymus-dependent (T) cells. Like the other B-cell mitogens such as bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS), nystatin elicited nonspecifically polyclonal antibody synthesis in mouse spleen cell cultures, and also restored antibody response of T cell-deficient spleen cells of congenitally athymic nude mice to heterologous erythrocytes (RBC; thymus-dependent antigen). Thus, nystatin and LPS appeared to cause similar changes in the functions of spleen cells relevant to immunological events. However, antagonism but no additive effect in the adjuvanticity was revealed between the two adjuvants. As an interesting finding, the polyclonal generation of anti-RBC antibody-forming cells (AFC) in the spleen cell cultures by stimulation with B-cell mitogen, i.e., either nystatin or LPS, was not inhibited at all by inclusion of any anti-RBC antiserum, whereas, as is well known, the generation of AFC by stimulation with the antigen was specifically suppressed by the corresponding antiserum, indicating a difference in the genesis between the mitogen-induced AFC and the antigen-induced AFC.