Abstract
Summary
Thymus lymphocytes from young chickens have been fractionated by differential centrifugation and tested for their graft-vs-host activity by the splenomegaly test. The experiments provide further evidence for the cellular heterogeneity in the young chicken thymus, previously demonstrated by electrophoretic analysis, differential centrifugation and cell traffic studies. The low-speed centrifugation fractions have been shown to consist of two populations with electrophoretically different mobilities, while the high-speed fraction is highly enriched in one electrophoretically slow-moving population. The data from the present study indicate that the thymus cell fraction obtained at high-speed centrifugation (750g), which is highly enriched in bursa-dependent cells, has little GVH activity. The low-speed fractions (100g and 300g) carry most of the GVH activity, presumably by a bursa-independent subpopulation.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.