FURTHER STUDIES ON INTERACTIONS BETWEEN 

 SESSILE AND HUMORAL ANTIBODIES IN HOMO- 

 GRAFT REACTIONS 



J. R. Batchelor and M. S. Silverman* 



Department of Pathology, Guy's Hospital Medical School, London 



It is now clear that extremist views attributing the breakdown 

 of all allogeneic grafts to a single mechanism can no longer be 

 held. In a specific set of conditions, a particular factor may play 

 a predominant role; but the degree of influence exerted by this 

 factor changes with the conditions. For example, Bihingham and 

 Sparrow (1954) have shown that the growth of dissociated rabbit 

 epidermal cells may be inhibited by immune serum, whereas the 

 growth of undissociated tissue was not. In mice the influence of 

 cellular factors in the rejection of allogeneic skin grafts becomes 

 less prominent as the host is subjected to further immunization. 

 The cellular infiltration so characteristic of a primary graft is 

 markedly less evident in the "second-set" reaction. Hyper- 

 immunization may lead to a *' white graft" type of rejection, which 

 Chutna and Pokorna (1961) consider to be the result of an Arthus 

 phenomenon. It is uncertain whether humoral antibody plays a 

 significant part in the destruction of a primary skin graft. But its 

 function must be of considerable importance in the immune host 

 in view of the histological features of graft rejection in such 

 animals, and the effects of passively administered hyperimmune 

 antisera demonstrated by Stetson and Demopoulos (1958) and 



* Special Research Fellow of The National Cancer Institute, National Institutes 

 of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A. Present address: U.S. Naval Radiological 

 Defense Laboratory, San Francisco 24, California. 



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