The Immune Response of Guinea Pigs to Hapten-poly-L-Lysine Conjugates as an Example of the Genetic Control of the Recognition of Antigenicity

Numerous observations have demonstrated the importance of genetic factors in the recognition of immunogenicity and in the ability to identify certain antigenic determinants, even though the antibodies produced are a heterogeneous population of molecules. (1.) There is a statistically significant relation between the ability of parents and offspring to respond to some antigens (Carlinfanti, 1948; Fjord-Scheibel, 1943; Sang and Sobey, 1954) and pure strains of mice differ in the amounts of antibody which they produce to different antigens (Ibsen, 1959). (2.) More recently, Sobey, Magrath, and Reisner (1966) have observed that an occasional mouse from randomly bred stock is naturally unresponsive to bovine serum albumin (BSA) and that such mice, when bred, produce both responsive and unresponsive mice. The fraction of offspring which are unresponsive increases with successive generations, and after the 6th or 7th generation, approximately 90% of the offspring of such matings are unresponsive to BSA. These experiments...