Normal, resting lymphocytes do not bind AFP. Lymphoblasts can bind AFP as can macrophages and monocytes.from spleen or peripheral blood, respectively. The problem with identifying cells as being AFP-R negative is that the receptor itself has not been identified. Most recent work has been done in human cells due to the potential of AFP as a tumor-associated antigen. Current reviews are in Tumour Biol. (2011) 32 (2):241-258; ibid (2013) 34 (3):1317-1336; ibid 34 (4):2075-2091.

Thank you. We needed to titer our self-made AFP-FITC conjugate by flow. cyt. Indeed, we used PBMC as negative control and tried HepG2 for positive. However, we did not find any information about whether AFP receptor expression on HepG2 is uniform or at what percent, namely methods used by other authors which articles we found did not contain dot plotsabout it. Also HepG2 showed no strong AFP binding, may be it was related to the fact that HepG2 produces AFP by its own as this kind of information exists, so may be it has blocked their own AFP receptors. We didn't treat HepG2 with e.g. translation blocking agents and didn't perform dissociation of ligands from receptors so we don't know the exact reason.