Mendelian sergregation of a tolerance-inducing self-antigen in the spleen

Others have reported that CBA/J neonatal thymus cells possess mixed lymphocyte culture reactivity against adult spleen cells from the same strain. This activity is not present in adult thymus. In this paper we describe experiments which show that C3H/ HeJ, a closely related strain, lacks the spleen antigen which CBA possesses. The antigen segregates as a simple Mendelian dominant trait in reciprocal backcross experiments. Only animals that possess the antigen lose their ability to react with it. These observations make this system a promising one to determine the mechanism of self-tolerance in nonchimeric individuals.