Antibody Formation and Natural Resistance in Nutritional Deficiencies

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
A vaccine prepared from killed cultures of Corynebacterium kutscheri, strain 197, has been administered to rats with variious dietary deficiencies: calories, thiamine, pyridoxine and pantothenic acid. With deficiencies of calories or thiamine, there is no significant reduction in ability to form agglutinins. No detectable agglutinins are formed in pyridoxine deficiency. In pantothenate deficiency, some animals lose their ability to form agglutinins while this capacity is impaired in others, resulting in a mean value between those for deficiencies of thiamine and pyridoxine. Ability to make agglutinins is entirely unrelated to the degree of resistance to the live organism shown by rats on these various regimes. Therefore it is concluded that the resistance of the normal rat, which is lost in pantothenate deficiency, does not rest upon ability to form antibodies as typified by agglutinins.