Importance of short-lived lymphocytes in the immune response

Lymphocytes are heterogeneous with respect to their life-span. Typical B cells, bearing on their membranes immunoglobulin receptors, easily detectable by immunofluorescence, belong mainly to the long-lived population: this can be observed using combined autoradiography and immunofluorescence. However, when primed mice receive (-3H) thymidine before a boosting injection of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), many plasma cells appearing in the spleen during the secondary response are labelled. In irradiated recipients repopulated with spleen cells from donors primed with TMV and injected with tritiated thymidine 2 hours before killing, the majority of plasms cells appearing in the spleen after antigen injection were labelled. If irradiated mice were repopulated simultaneously with spleen cells from donors primed with TMV and injected with (-3H) thymidine, and from donors primed with haemocyanin, most of the anti-TMV plasms cells were labelled, while most of the anti-haemocyanin plasma cells were unlabelled. These results allowed us to exclude non-specific reutilization of labelled thymidine as the main reason of our observations. It is concluded that either plasma cells derive from shortlived precursors or they receive material from a labelled cell able to co-operate specifically with plasma cell precursors.