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. 1970 Mar 31;131(4):783–802. doi: 10.1084/jem.131.4.783

THE FIXATION OF COMPLEMENT AND THE ACTIVATED FIRST COMPONENT (C1) OF COMPLEMENT BY COMPLEXES FORMED BETWEEN ANTIBODY AND DIVALENT HAPTEN

N E Hyslop Jr 1, R R Dourmashkin 1, N M Green 1, R R Porter 1
PMCID: PMC2138777  PMID: 5430788

Abstract

Hapten-antibody complexes prepared at equivalence with the bivalent hapten bis-DNP-octamethylene-diamine and purified rabbit anti-DNP antibody were fractionated by Sepharose gel-filtration and the fractions examined by electron microscopy. Individual fractions were tested for whole-complement fixation and C1 fixation. Dimer forms did not show this type of biological activity, while fractions containing tetramers and larger polymers exhibited both C and C1 fixation, which could be inhibited by prior exposure of the complexes to the univalent hapten epsilon-DNP-caproic acid. The dose-response result indicated that the C-fixation observed was not due to interpolymeric cooperative effects. It was concluded that in the generation of biological activity by soluble antigen-antibody complexes made with complement-fixing antibody, quaternary structural changes following specific combination with antigen may be as important as any tertiary structural alterations that occur in the individual immunoglobulin molecule.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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