F. Melchers, M. Potter, NL. Warner HISTORICAL Prior to 1964 many workers had experienced considerable difficulty in establishing continuous lines of murine plasmacytoma in culture. Pettingill and Sorenson in 1966 grew X5563 after a painstaking period of adaptation. During a visit to the Salk Instiute in 1965 Leo Sachs began experiments with K. Horibata, E. S. Lennox and M. Cohn that ulti mateley convinced most workers that murine plasmacytomas could be grown in vitro with ease. They adapted MOPC-21 * {called P3 at the Salk Institute) to in vitro culture and showed the cells produced a large...

Michael Potter, Fritz Melchers, Martin Weigert The second workshop on Mechanisms of B Cell Neoplasia was held in Bethesda, Maryland in Wilson Hall at the National Institutes of Health on March 5, 6, and 7, 1984. It followed a workshop on the same topic that was held at the Basel Institute for Immunology, March 15-17, 1983. That first meeting attempted to bring together cell biologists, experimental pathologists and molecular geneti- cists interested in B cells, to discuss pathogenetic processes in the development and maintenance of the neoplastic state. The impetus for this discussion...

The cells of the immune system generate a large variety of binding sites which differ in their binding specificities and can therefore react specifically with a large variety of ligands. These binding sites are part of receptor molecules, enabling the system to react to the universe of antigens. The classical antigen receptor is the antibody molecule, and accord ingly the first session of this colloquium deals with a classical sub ject, namely antibody structure. Dramatic recent advances in this field make it possible to interrelate primary and three-dimensional struc ture both to each other...