The proliferation of human jejunal intraepithelial lymphocytes (IEL) was examined to determine how it differed from that of peripheral blood (PB) T lymphocytes. The IEL were mainly T lymphocytes of the cytotoxic-suppressor (T8+) phenotype. They demonstrated lower proliferative responses to various stimuli (2,501 +/- 565 ct/min with phytohaemagglutinin; PHA) compared to unseparated PB T lymphocytes (73,678 +/- 2,495) or the T8+ subset (68,939 +/- 10,053 ct/min) (P less than 0.001). This low proliferative response was also a characteristic of the T8+ T lymphocytes in the lamina propria (4,606 +/- 1,226 ct/min) but not the T4+ subset (43,447 +/- 10,188 ct/min) (P less than 0.05). These findings were not due to isolation techniques or to differences in kinetics. Mixing experiments revealed that the IEL did not contain cells which suppressed proliferation. In addition, the IEL could be stimulated by mitogens, as they produced the same amount of interleukin 2 (IL-2) and IL-2 receptors as did PB T lymphocytes. Although the lectin-induced proliferative response of IEL was unaltered by the addition of autologous macrophages and minimally increased by IL-2, it was markedly enhanced by the addition of sheep red blood cells (SRBC). The enhancing effect of SRBC was not due to T cell recognition of xenogenic antigens on the erythrocytes since neither allogeneic non-T lymphocytes nor other xenogenic erythrocytes produced the same effect. Both intact SRBC and membrane fragments from osmotically lysed cells augmented lymphocyte proliferation. Thus, jejunal IEL could be activated by mitogen and proliferated as much as PB T lymphocytes if exposed to a membrane component found on SRBC.