摘要：

SINCE lymphoid blood cells play an important part in the mediation of delayed hypersensitivity and homograft rejection1–4, it is reasonable to expect that further understanding of these forms of immunological responsiveness will come from appropriate in vitro investigations of circulating lymphocytes. Lymphocyte reactivity in vitro may also provide insight into the pathogenesis of diseases involving immune or autoimmune mechanisms and provide a measure of the efficacy of immunological suppression. It has been the particular goal of several laboratories5–7 to apply such lymphocyte investigations to the problem of donor selection for human organ transplantation, and for this purpose several techniques for the culture of lymphocytes and the measurement of their reactivity have been developed. Inasmuch as the methods being used to determine human lymphocyte reactivity, that is, conversion of lymphocytes to large immature cells5,6, counting of mitoses5,6 and autoradiography with tritiated thymidine5 are laborious and subject to several sources of error, a simple quantitative technique for following lymphocyte reactions in vitro would be of considerable value. The present communication describes such a method which is based on the incorporation of 14C-labelled thymidine into the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of reacting cultured lymphocytes. This method was developed to investigate the lymphocytes of patients with Hodgkin's disease, a condition in which delayed type (cell-mediated) hypersensitivity and homograft rejection are regularly depressed8.

展开