Cellular Transfer of Antibody Production from Adult to Embryo in Domestic Fowls

Simonsen8 demonstrated that the intravenous inoculation of adult fowl spleen cells or peripheral white blood cells into chick embryos gave rise to splenic enlargement and a Coomb's positive hemolytic anemia in the recipient chick. He found that this effect was species specific, required viable cells from donors over 11 days of age for its initiation, and could be passaged from chick to chick at least nine times without apparent diminution of the phenomenon. He concluded that the reaction represented colonization of the recipient spleen by the implanted adult cells and that the adult cells produced antibodies against the antigens of the recipient chick, as manifested by the Coomb's positive chick red blood cells and hemolytic anemia. This thesis was further supported by the subsequent finding' that only slight splenic enlargement occurred when cells were transferred between antigenically similar inbred strains. These findings are particularly relevant to the "clonal selection" theory of antibody formation of Burnet' in which it is postulated that an antigen serves to create a selective environment for functional replication of previously existing clones of specific antibody-producing cells. This theory would imply that cells capable of producing specific antibodies such as viral antihemagglutinating antibodies could be transferred from an immune adult donor to an embryonic recipient and then serially passaged from embryo to embryo under the influence of an appropriate antigenic environment. The work to be presented was prompted by a desire to test this possibility using influenza virus as an antigcn and the method described by Simo.nsen as the test system.