LOCALIZATION OF ANTIGEN IN TISSUE CELLS

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Abstract
The fate of crystalline hen''s egg albumin, crystalline bovine plasma albumin, and human plasma gamma-globulin, after intraven. injn. into mice, was traced by preparing frozen sections of quick-frozen tissue, allowing any foreign protein present in the section to react with homologous antibody labelled with fluorescein, and examining the section under the fluorescence microscope. By this means, all 3 of these proteins were found in the cells of the reticulo-endothelial system, the connective tissue, the vascular endothelium, the lymphocytes of spleen and lymph node, and the epithelium of the kidney tubules, the liver, and in small amts. in the adrenal. The central nervous system was not studied. All 3 persisted longest in the reticulo-endothelial system and the connective tissue, and in the doses employed, egg white (10 mg.) was no longer detectable after 1 day, bovine albumin (10 mg.) after 2 days, and human gamma-globulin (4 mg.) after 6 days, although in a somewhat higher dose (10 mg.) human gamma-globulin persisted longer than 8 days. Egg albumin differed from the others in not being detectable in the cells of the renal glomerulus. Each protein was present in the nuclei of each cell type enumerated above, often in higher concn. than in the cytoplasm. Further, some of the nuclei not only contained antigen, soon after injn., but were also surrounded by a bright ring associated with the nuclear membrane. By photographic records under the fluorescence microscope of the same field subsequently stained with hematoxylin and eosin, it was detd. that the antigen was not adsorbed to chromatin or nucleoli, but was apparently in soln. in the nuclear sap.