“…Although the presence of biliary lipid antigens was detected using murine NKT hybridomas, human and murine NKT cells show a high level of conservation [7] and there is an overlap of activating lipids between human and murine NKT cells [43], and mechanisms for molecular recognition are conserved [44,45]. Among the previously described classes of lipids in bile [21,41], the iNKT hybridoma 24.8 has been found to be responsive to phosphatidylinositol (PI), phosphatidylglycerol (PG), phosphatidylcholine PC, phosphatidylethanolamine (PE), sphingomyelin (SM), the niNKT hybridoma 14S.6 has been found to respond to PI, PG, PE, lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC) and lysophosphatidylethanolamine (LPE) and the niNKT hybridoma 14S.7 has been found to respond to PI [14,23,46]. Thus, the activating lipids found in our experiments probably belong to one of these classes.…”