Abstract
In connection with the work on the relation of sensitizers to the alexin in 1906, Bordet and Gay described the presence in bovine serum of a substance to which the name of “colloid” was given. This colloidal substance had the property of producing a characteristic clumping of red blood cells and of accelerating their lysis when they had been treated with both a sensitizer and an alexin; its action was possible under no other circumstance. To this substance the name of “conglutinin” was subsequently given by Bordet and Streng, perhaps somewhat inadvisedly as the term had been used to describe the agglutination of blood cells by ricin. At about the same time a probably similar substance was described in goat serum by Manwaring to which the name of “auxilysin” was given, but the description of its mode of action has remained insufficient for identifying it with the colloidal substance of Bordet and Gay. In 1908 Streng was able to reproduce the phenomenon of conglutination in bacteria that had been treated with a specific sensitizer and an alexin, on the addition of bovine serum from which the normal agglutinins had been removed, if such were present. He further suggests the possible use of this reaction in the diagnosis of infections such as typhoid fever, in which case the blood of the patient would serve as the sensitizing serum.
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