The effect of site of transplantation and histocompatibility differences on the survival of neural tissue transplanted to the CNS of defined inbred rat strains.

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the effect of the site of transplantation and histocompatibility differences on the survival of neural tissue transplanted to the central nervous system (CNS) of defined inbred rat strains. In the experiment described in the chapter, all transplantation was carried out under clean surgical conditions. Cortex tissue dissected from day 1 neonatal rats was used throughout. The sites chosen for transplantation were the third ventricle (10 μl), the lateral ventricles (10 μl), or the caudate-putamen (4 μl). In all 3 sites, syngeneic grafts of day 1 cortex tissue survived for the duration of the experiments. An initial settling in period of about 20 days for all grafts was observed. During this time, a slight class I major histocomaptibility complex (MHC) expression was seen together with some infiltration. The survival of grafts to the lateral ventricles and caudate-putamen was found to be very variable with the greater numbers of T c cells present in these than in the MHC-only different grafts at 30 days post-transplantation. These results suggest that multiple mH differences alone may be more immunogenic than MHC-only differences in these strains.