Immunchemical Investigation on Antithrombin III/AT-III/in Presence of Heparin

Various components of AT-III car, be differentiated by crossed ioununo-eleetrophoresis in the presence of heparin as we described previously / Sas et al. 1975 /. The migration of heparin is discontinuous in this original method, i.e. at the end of the electrophoresis the plate does not contain heparin at all. This fact rises the possibility pf the artefactual nature of these AT-III components. To exclude this effect we introduced a modification using double plates incorporated with heparin. The second plate was used as a heparin “reservoir”. By this modification we obtained constant heparin flow in the course of electrophoresis. We found four different AT-III components in normal plasma comparing with three AT-III eomportints of the original method.

Investigating heparins originated from different sources we found a higher mobility of AT-III in the pnsenee of mucous heparin than that of lung heparin. This observation corresponds well with the results obtamed by heparin-agarose affinity chromatography.