Jeffrey Perkel | Apr 29, 2001 | 2 min read
Antigen-specific T lymphocytes must be quantified in order to gauge the quality of an immune response. Typically this is accomplished using cytotoxicity assays or limiting dilution analysis (LDA), but these techniques are lengthy and provide indirect quantitation. Also, LDA cannot count nonproliferative cells. In 1996, Stanford University's Mark Davis developed an alternative strategy that overcomes these problems.1 Davis generated phycoerythrin-conjugated tetramers of human lymphocyte antigen (