Antigen non-specific tissue damage in T cell-mediated experimental autoimmune orchitis: preliminary characterization of a testis-specific T-cell line by using dermal tissue and cells.

A previous study demonstrated the establishment of a murine testicular antigen (mTA)-specific CD4+ T-cell line (designated BT.1) which was capable of transferring experimental autoimmune epididymo-orchitis to naive recipient mice. The disease transfer was antigen-specific, because no inflammatory lesion was observed in any other organs and tissues of the recipients. In this study, to investigate the local environment of BT.1 cells, the effect of the cells and their culture supernatant on a local tissue integrity was studied. When BT.1 cells were seeded on cultured fibroblastoid cell monolayers, the cells completely disrupted these monolayers in spite of the absence of the specific antigens. Moreover, the culture supernatant of BT.1 cells induced non-specific dermal inflammation when injected into skin tissue of normal syngeneic mice. Therefore, BT.1 cells were shown to devastate a tissue integrity and cause attraction and activation of inflammatory cells of the recipient origin in a local environment. These results suggest that the transferred BT.1 cells will specifically home to the testis and epididymis of recipients but the following devastation of seminiferous tubules and epididymal ducts might be non-specifically produced by the inflammatory cells of both donor and recipient origin in the lesion.