Leucocyte Typing IV

The Fourth International Workshop on Human Leucocyte Differentiation Antigens gathered together 525 laboratories which jointly evaluated and/or submitted about 1100 different monoclonal antibodies to human leucocyte surface molecules. The results of these collaborative experiments were reported at the meeting, compared and summarized to produce a careful description of 89 human leucocyte antigens, 35 of them fully characterized for the first time. This book, which contains the first complete account of these experiments aims to become the standard reference work in the field. It will prove valuable to immunologists, cell biologists, molecular biologists, haematologists and pathologists. Antigens specific for certain leucocyte lineages, leucocyte subsets, or differentiation stages, or shared by all leucocytes, are featured. Details are given of their distribution, molecular structure and function. Much attention is given to the functional role of these surface structures in cellular interaction processes and to deviations of their expression in pathological processes. In contrast to previous workshops and conferences two clear tendencies emerged.
The functional importance of broadly distributed, non-lineage restricted, surface molecules of human leucocytes is beginning to be widely appreciated, and the molecular cloning and dequencing of genes coding for surface molecules with the help of monoclonal antibodies and newly developed expression vector systems, now play a major role in the development of this field. This workshop continues the collaboration established by A.Bernard and L.Boumsell, who organized the first workshop in 1980, bringing order and a standardized nomenclature to the field which exploded once it was appreciated how powerful monoclonal antibodies are as tools for investigating the anatomy of cell surfaces.