Hybrids between irradiated and unirradiated mammalian cells: survival and chromosome segregation.

We have studied the effect of X or gamma irradiation, of one parent of a cell hybrid, on hybrid viability and chromosome segregation. The hybrid types studied were mouse--Chinese hamster (which spontaneously lose a few hamster chromosomes) and Chinese hamster--human (which spontaneously lose most of the human complement). Preirradiation of the segregated and retained cell parent resulted in highly asymmetric hybrid survival curves; survival was greatly reduced when the retained parent was irradiated, especially for hamster-human fusions. Preirradiation of the parents of mouse-hamster hybrids modified both the direction and the extent of chromosome segregation, but no consistent effect on elimination was observed for hamster-human hybrids, and reversal of the direction of loss was never observed. These results are more consistent with the hypothesis that chromosome segregation from hybrids results from an intracellular chromosome selection, than with the hypothesis that cellular selection acts on randomly generated chromosome variants.