Ly-51 Rat anti-Mouse, FITC, Clone: 6C3, BD

Beschreibung

The 6C3 antibody reacts with an epitope of the 6C3/BP-1 (Ly-51) glycoprotein cell-surface differentiation antigen, which was originally identified on pre-B cell lymphomas (spontaneous and chemical- or retrovirus- transformed, in vitro and in vivo). 6C3/BP-1 is a homodimer cell-surface glycoprotein with 140-kDa subunits which has been identified to possess aminopeptidase A (APA) activity. The same antigen is expressed at high levels on bone marrow stromal cell lines which support in vitro B lymphopoieses, on thymic dendritic cells and cortical epithelial cells, and on a wide variety of mouse and rat tissues known to possess APA activity. Subsets of normal bone marrow pre-B and B lymphocytes express low levels of Ly-51, which is rapidly up-regulated on the pre-B cells in the presence of IL-7. A role for the 6C3/BP-1 molecule in the IL-7-driven proliferation of B cell precursors has been postulated. However, B-cell abnormalities were not detected in Ly-51-deficient mice. Mature B lymphocytes, thymocytes, peripheral T lymphocytes, erythroid cells, and myeloid cells (with the exception of thymic dendritic cells) do not express Ly-51. The 6C3 antibody can be used to identify cortical epithelium in frozen sections of thymuses from normal, SCID, and TCR-transgenic mice. It is possible that the low level of 6C3/BP-1 antigen detected, by flow cytometry, on some thymocytes may be passively adsorbed from adjacent epithelial cells during preparation of the cell suspensions.