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JOURNAL OF lBEMJMJ~GICAL

Journal of Immunological Methods 184 (1995) 277

Letter to the editors

Reaction to Vowells et al. (J. Immunol. Methods 178 (1995) 89-97)

John A. Smith *

National Quality of Life Foundation, Department of Physiology and Applied Nutrition, Australian Institute of Sport, P.O. Box 176. Belconnen, ACT 2616, Australia

Received 27 April 1995; accepted 5 June 1995

Dear Editors, In the above article Vowells et al. reported

inter alia, that a direct comparison between the flow cytometric probes DCF-DA, DHR and C- DCF had not been reported previously. This is not strictly correct. In an earlier edition of the same journal, we (Smith and Weidemann, J. Im- munol. Methods (1993) 162, 261) reported that DHR was a much more sensitive probe for the intracellular detection of neutrophil oxidants compared to DCF-DA. We published an exten- sive comparison between the fluorescent signals

of both probes, and the effect of azide, in our article. In both cases, the results of Vowells et al. confirmed our original work.

I believe the readers of the journal should be made aware, or reminded, of our work. It is surprising that our paper was not cited when literature searching in this limited field is fairly easy. It is even more astonishing when it is pub- lished in the same journal.

I do not suggest anything sinister by Vowells et al. but believe that our contribution to this field should be presented.

* Fax: +61-6 2521603.

Elsevier Science B.V.

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