Correlation between the mobility of inner plasma membrane structure and agglutination by concanavalin A in two cell lines of MOPC 173 plasmocytoma cells.

Both the distribution of the concanavalin A-binding sites and the rearrangement of the intramembranous particles revealed by the freeze-etching technique, have been studied by means of two variants of the same cell line issued from MOPC 173 murine plasmocytoma. One variant does not agglutinate even in presence of high lectin concentration. It has been shown that the number of binding sites and affinity are almost the same in the two variants. The clustered distribution of intramembranous particles is induced by the interaction of the concanavalin A and the cell surface only in the variant which is agglutinable. From these results it became apparent that the clustered distribution of the membrane particulate components is an acquired feature of the plasma membrane accompanying cell agglutination.