Lymphoid-Cell Cooperation in Immune Responses of the Chicken

Abstract

Our knowledge of cellular interactions in the immune response of chickens is in a primitive stage as compared with the degree of sophistication with which such interactions are being interpreted for mouse cells. Relatively little use has been made of the unique position that the bursa occupies in the ontogeny of B cells, as initially shown by the experiments on bursectomy by Glick et al. (1956), Mueller et al. (1960), and Warner et al. (1962). Although there is still some difference of opinion about this (Jankovic et al., 1975), it seems likely that the chicken has no other source of virgin B cells (Kincade et al., 1973) and that the bursa is, from approximately day 13 until day 19 of ontogeny, the only site of B-cell formation and Ig synthesis (Thorbecke et al., 1968; Kincade and Cooper, 1971). The lymphoid follicles in the bursa arise from the influx of hematopoietic cells into the epithelial site near the cloaca (Moore and Owen, 1965, 1966). This influx starts during the 8th day and continues until at least the 15th day of incubation (Houssaint et al., 1976). Once cells have differentiated in the bursa, they have different surface antigens from those of cells in the thymus (Albini and Wick, 1974; Galton and Ivanyi, 1977; Donnelly et al., 1975; McArthur et al., 1971; Forget et al., 1970), are slightly larger (Sherman and Auerbach, 1966), and have a somewhat different chromatin distribution (Olson et al., 1973).