Concerning Natural Hemolysins in Rabbit Serum

Abstract

During the course of some work on the site of formation of immune hemolysins, the results of which will be published in a later communication, was necessary to determine whether or not the serum of the animal about to be immunized contained any natural hemolytic amboceptors to the erythrocytes which were to be injected. Rabbits, immunized with sheep's corpuscles, were used. Before starting the injections, the sera of the rabbits were tested for natural anti-sheep hemolysins and in 16 of the 18 used, or 88 per cent, their presence was demonstrated. This result was unexpected, and accordingly we titrated an additional 32 normal rabbit sera to determine if such a large percentage were accidental. The result is shown in Table i. A fairly minute search of literature failed to give us any reference to observations along this line. Bordet' states that it is a general rule, applicable to all sera, that the power to destroy red blood corpuscles disappears on heating to 550 C. Subsequently he says: Guinea-pig serum and rabbit serum have both a very slight destructive effect on hen and human Rabbit serum, however, is much more active against guinea-pig corpuscles, but is almost entirely without effect on rat corpuscles ..... Normal rabbit serum contains a sensitizer for goat corpuscles. Ehrlich2 observes that rabbit serum is often hemolytic to goat red blood corpuscles and that contains a very variable amount of hemolysin for guinea-pig blood. After observing the almost constant occurrence of natural antisheep hemolysin in rabbit serum, we decided would be interesting to determine if contained native hemolytic amboceptors for the