Transfer of susceptibility to experimental autoimmune orchitis from responder to non-responder substrains of BALB/c mice

Abstract

Substrains of BALB/c mice differ in their susceptibility to experimental autoimmune orchitis (EAO), with BALB/cJ representative of the non-responders and BALB/cBy representative of the responders. We examined whether the susceptibility of these two substrains could be altered by reciprocal adoptive transfer of lymphoid cells. The cells transferred were of three types, normal spleen cells, T cell-enriched spleen and lymph node cells from mice immunized with testis homogenate (TH) in complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA) and given an extract of Bordetella pertussis (BP) and the latter cells activated by in vitro culture with TH antigen for 48 h. Controls were given buffer alone. Cell or buffer recipients were immunized with TH + CFA + BP three weeks later and examined for testicular histopathology 25–28 days after immunization. The cultured, immune T-enriched cells were consistently effective in transferring susceptibility from BALB/cBy to BALB/cJ. In the reverse experiments, non-responsiveness could be transferred from BALB/cJs to BALB/cBys most effectively with immune, non-cultured T-enriched cells. Transfer of cultured, immune T-enriched cells from BALB/cJs to other BALB/cJs had no significant effect on susceptibility to EAO. The results suggest that susceptibility to EAO in BALB/c mice depends on the T cell responses in the mice and not on differences at the level of the testis.