Homing of blood, splenic, and lung emigrant lymphoblasts: comparison with the behaviour of lymphocytes from these sources.

The distinctive homing patterns of [125I]deoxyuridine-labelled lymphoblasts and 51Cr-labelled lymphocytes from the three sites--splenic and pulmonary venous emigrants, and peripheral blood--were demonstrated by study of their entry into a large number of tissues. These included the major organs such as the lung, liver, bone marrow, spleen, skin, and muscle, and several lymph nodes (LNs), Peyer's patches (PPs), tonsils and thymus, portions throughout the gastrointestinal tract and immunologically-stimulated sites. Major differences in homing of blood blasts (up to 4-fold) were found in particular tissue types, such as the different LNs, three PP types, and the three tonsils, and their distribution was quite different from lymphocytes. While splenic blasts behaved like blood blasts, lung blasts showed even more distinctive homing, e.g. to tissues with particular blast uptake, including spleen, stomach, bladder, portal and stimulated LNs, and liver and lung. While blast recovery data showed that all types homed well to bone marrow (about 25%) and the gastrointestinal wall (about 15%), the roughly 50% found in blood, muscle, skin, lung, and liver showed some homing preferences: blood blasts tended to stay more in blood, splenic blasts to home to muscle, and lung blasts to liver and lung. These studies have demonstrated that physiologically-derived lymphoblasts are not predominantly mucosal-homing but distribute through several non-lymphoid organs and that, even considering only those in the blood compartments, they show differences in homing preference.