Pulmonary, hepatic and splenic sequestration of technetium-99m labelled autologous rabbit granulocytes: scintigraphic cell distributions after intravenous and intraarterial injections, exsanguination and intraarterial injection of cells passed through an intermediary host.

In man, about half the intravascular granulocytes are not freely circulating, but temporarily sequestered ('marginated'), so that they cannot be retrieved by bleeding. Where and how the sequestration occurs is not settled and is the subject of the present report. Isolated autologous rabbit granulocytes, labelled with two different 99mTc methods, were reinjected and followed with external scintigraphy. Intraarterial as well as intravenous injection led to rapid accumulation of radioactivity over the lungs. This finding was corroborated and extended by similar experiments, where the labelled cells had firstly been passed through an intermediary rabbit host to remove altered cells, i.e. cells damaged, 'primed' (pre-activated), or activated. In the final autologous host about two thirds of the label rapidly localized to the lungs and liver, and a few per cent to the spleen (which is very small in the rabbit). Even though more than half of the intermediary rabbit's calculated blood volume was removed, the blood sample contained only a few per cent of the rabbit's radioactivity; consequently, many of the labelled leucocytes had marginated during the bleeding. The proportional distribution of radioactivity over lungs, spleen, kidneys, and the rest of the intermediary animal was not markedly changed by this exsanguination, but there was a 4-20% decrease over the liver. Taken together, our findings indicate that normal granulocytes marginate in lungs, liver, and spleen--apparently explicable by the effects of cell size, vessel diameter, cell stiffness (visco-elastic properties) and size of the arterio-venous hydrostatic pressure difference. The liver and spleen seemed to play additional roles, since radioactivity over these organs decreased much slower than expected from reported blood half-times of intact and slightly damaged rabbit granulocytes. This led to a suggestion that macrophages exposed to blood normally phagocytose apoptotically dying granulocytes.