Relation between enhanced antibody responses elicited by adjuvant injection and those elicited by secondary antigenic stimulation.

An attempt was made to determine if there is any common mechanism in the enhanced antibody response caused either by injection of adjuvant, such as bacterial endotoxin (LPS) and complexed poly-nucleotides, or by secondary antigenic stimulation. LPS inoculated in mice 4 days before injection of sheep red cells (SRBC) and polyA:U invalidated the adjuvant effect of polyA:U injected together with SRBC, and the hemolysin plaque-forming cell (PFC) response of such mice was similar to that of the mice which received SRBC alone. When mice primed with SRBC 24 days in advance were injected with LPS and 4 days later re-stimulated with SRBC, their PFC response to the secondary stimulation was suppressed to less than one tenth of the normal secondary PFC response. The suppressive effect of LPS on the secondary antibody response was abolished if the serum collected from mice injected with LPS was given to the primed and LPS-injected mice at the time of the secondary antigenic stimulation. From these results we discussed the possibility that some common mediator might play a role in the enhanced antibody response elicited by either adjuvant injection or secondary injection of antigen.