In vivo mechanisms of alloreactivity. II. Allospecificity of cytotoxic T lymphocytes in sponge matrix allografts as determined by limiting dilution analysis.

We have examined the frequency and alloantigen specificity of CTL that accumulate in sponge allografts (sponges seeded with allogeneic splenocytes) in sponge isografts (sponges seeded with syngeneic splenocytes), and in splenocyte-free sponge implants. Using limiting dilution analysis (LDA), we observed that sponge isografts and splenocyte-free sponge implants from C57BL/6 (H-2b) mice usually acquire small numbers of CTL (less than 250 cells per graft) with DBA/2 (H-2d)-reactivity or C3H/HeJ (H-2k)-reactivity. These alloreactive CTL are not detectable in conventional 51Cr-release assays, presumably because they are too infrequent and/or because they are inactive CTL precursors. When we examined the accumulation of alloreactive CTL in sponge allografts, we observed that DBA/2 sponge allografts from C57BL/6 recipients accumulate 10 to 100 times more DBA/2-reactive CTL than alloantigen-free sponge grafts. Nonetheless, these donor-reactive CTL rarely constitute more than 0.5% of the T cells recovered from sponge allografts, even at the peak of the rejection response. This raises questions concerning the remaining 99.5% of the allograft-infiltrating T cells. We were unable to detect by LDA any host-reactive CTL in sponge allografts, thus excluding the possibility that some of the remaining T cells were host-reactive CTL of donor origin which diluted graft-reactive T cells. However, using LDA we did detect a significant number of third-party (C3H/HeJ)-reactive CTL in sponge allografts, suggesting that the intense immune response at a graft site might facilitate indiscriminate recruitment of T lymphocytes. Alternatively, this enhanced third-party alloreactivity might reflect the proliferation of donor-reactive CTL with incidental crossreactivity for C3H/HeJ alloantigens. While testing these two alternatives, we observed that LDA cultures designed to detect third-party-reactive CTL could also support the growth of the in vivo-activated, donor-reactive CTL from sponge allografts; This compromised enumeration by LDA of the less frequent, third-party-reactive CTL by LDA. Although LDA is the only method that detects the growing population of third-party-reactive CTL in sponge allografts, technical restraints exclude LDA as a method of determining whether donor-reactive CTL and third-party-reactive CTL are separate or overlapping CTL subpopulations. Hence, it remains unclear if third-party-reactive CTL are a significant or insignificant proportion of the CTL that infiltrate sponge allografts.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)