Production of H-Y Antibody by Female Mice that Fail to Reject Male Skin

WHEN inbred mice are grafted with skin from inbred donors that differ from the recipients only by a single minor histocompatibility antigen, it is commonly observed that some recipients will retain their skin grafts while others will reject them. This is true of incompatibility for H-Y antigen, which is responsible for the rejection of male grafts by otherwise histocompatible inbred females of the same inbred strain¹. Thus in the DBA/2 (DBA) strain, male-to-female skin grafts are rejected by only some recipients; in the C57BL (B6) strain, females always reject male skin; and C3H/An (C3H) females usually accept male skin grafts indefinitely.