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Antibody-Binding Characteristics at the Cellular Level

II. Presence of Cells Secreting High Affinity IgG Antibody at the Onset of the Immune Response

From the Laboratory of Immunology, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20014

Abstract

The development of immune plaque-forming cell (PFC) populations producing IgG antibody of high affinity for the hapten, N-(2,4-dinitrophenyl)--alanylglycylglycine (DnpAGG) was studied in BALB/c mice. DnpAGG-specific PFC subpopulations differing in the affinity of their secreted antibodies were identified by the hapten-specific plaque inhibition technique. Immunization procedures were used which selected for or against the early appearance of high affinity PFC. With most procedures the main response late after antigen injection resided typically among high affinity PFC. Subpopulation profile analysis indicated that each of these procedures yielded the same high affinity PFC subpopulations. Population dominance by high affinity PFC was ordinarily reached 26 to 33 days after immunization, after which time no new PFC were detected which secreted antibody of any affinity higher than that previously observed. Under the influence of special immunization procedures these high affinity PFC could be readily detected, in reduced but significant numbers, as early as 4.5 days after immunization when IgG-secreting cells were first marking their appearance. These data indicate that in IgG, as in IgM, bone marrow-derived cell commitment to the synthesis of an antibody molecule having a given specificity and affinity commonly occurs before specific antigenic insult.

Footnotes

¹ Supported by National Institutes of Health, Postdoctoral Fellowship FO2 AI 37791. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to Dr. Latham Claflin, Department of Pathology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri 63110.