Site-selective homing of antigen-primed lymphocyte populations can play a crucial role in the efferent limb of cell-mediated immune responses in vivo.

Abstract

Lymphoid cells of the mammalian immune system exhibit special migratory properties within their in vivo environment. This fundamental characteristic is important to the protection of the organism from infection and neoplastic transformation by a process termed immunologic surveillance. The importance of lymphocyte recirculation was addressed by investigating the role of site-selective homing of lymphocytes during the efferent phase of an in vivo adoptively transferred immune response. We approached this problem by using pertussis toxin (PT), a known inhibitor of lymphoid cell migration in vivo. PT is a protein secreted by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis, which induces a selective and long-lasting inhibition of the emigration of lymphocytes from the bloodstream into solid tissue. In this study, we demonstrate that the blockade of lymphocyte extravasation potential mediates inhibition of certain cell-mediated immune responses in vivo. We investigated the effect of PT on the extravasation of antigen-primed lymphocytes into solid tissue. The results show that the loss of lymphocyte homing potential after in vitro treatment of the primed cells with PT is accompanied by an inhibition of antigen-specific contact hypersensitivity after adoptive transfer. This result suggests that the process of lymphocyte extravasation into nonlymphoid tissue sites such as the skin shares fundamental similarities to the selective localization of circulating lymphocytes to lymph nodes. Furthermore, the inhibition of contact hypersensitivity observed after the i.v. adoptive transfer of PT-treated antigen-primed cells could be circumvented by transferring the PT-treated cells directly into a tissue site with the relevant antigen. In contrast, no inhibition in the number of antibody-forming cells present within the spleen was observed after an adoptive transfer of PT-treated sheep red blood cell-primed lymphocytes, a result that is in agreement with radiotracer data. Thus, the inhibitory effect of PT on the adoptive transfer of contact hypersensitivity was established to be a direct result of the PT-mediated alteration of cellular migration, because PT inhibits the entrance of lymphocytes into specific tissue sites without inhibiting other cellular functions. This conclusion is additionally supported by experiments that showed that lymphocytes that have been pretreated with PT exhibit normal in vitro responses, as assayed by mitogenesis in response to concanavalin A and by the differentiation and function of alloantigen stimulated or hapten-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)