Unrepresentative behavior of T cell receptor-transgenic CD4+ T cells upon adoptive transfer: lack of need for priming and an extended booster dose-response.

Abstract The response of CD4 + T cells taken from DO11.10 αβTCR-transgenic mice to their specific antigen, ovalbumin, was examined in an adoptive transfer system. Read out was the % frequency of KJI-26.1 + (clonotype positive) cells within the Thy-1.2 + (T cell) population in lymph nodes. Control experiments indicated that these cells were uniformly CD4 + . Immunizing the transgenic mice had no detectable effect on this frequency. Furthermore, the frequency in recipients of adoptively transferred lymph node cells was not affected by priming of the donors with ovalbumin by various procedures. Transfers were into syngeneic SCID recipients, except in one experiment, where irradiated recipients were shown to behave in the same way. Examining the effect of varying the amount of booster antigen, the response increased slowly with dose, up to a plateau in the range of 10–100 mg ovalbumin. The lack of need for priming is unusual, in comparison with an adoptive transfer of non-transgenic cells, as is the extended dose response range with such a high optimum dose. This enhanced responsiveness is interpreted in terms of a lack of down-immunoregulation in these transgenic mice.