[Study of the phenomenon of specific suppression of the immune response in an adoptive transfer system]

It was revealed that the administration of the spleen cells (SC) of syngeneic animals immunized with a high dose of sheep red blood cells (SRBC) to intact mice led to a marked specific suppression of the recipients' immune response. The donors' SC obtained on the 14th day after the intraperitoneal injection of SRBC had the greatest suppressive activity. The SC of intact animals and mice given rat erythrocytes preliminarily failed to influence the immune response of the intact recipients in their SRBC immunization. Treatment of immune SC with the anti-T-serum (ATS) or the anti-B-globulin (ABG) and the complement considerably decreased or completely eliminated the suppressive activity. Administration of a mixture of two immune SC suspensions one of which was ATS- and another ABC-treated did not produce any suppression of the immune response in the intact recipients. It is supposed that the suppressor cells in the given model were T-lymphocytes expressing the antigens, common of cross-reacting with the B-cells.