Abstract
Cholesterol depletion of erythrocytes obtained after incubation with lecithin vesicles induced in 70% of the experiments: (1) a discocyte-stomatocyte transformation as observed by scanning electron microscopy, (2) a specific decrease in spectrin phosphorylation in intact erythrocytes. In the other experiments the shape change did not occur and the spectrin phosphorylation was unaltered. This suggests that the stomatocyte shape correlates better with the state of spectrin phosphorylation than with the membrane cholesterol content.