The specificity of suppressor T cells induced by chronic Mycobacterium avium infection in mice.

Normal mice infected intravenously with 10(6) or 10(8) viable M. avium develop persistent infections of the lungs, liver and spleen. The liver and spleen counts remained relatively constant whereas those for the lung slowly increased until eventually some of the animals began to die as a result of the infection. None of the heavily infected mice developed delayed hypersensitivity (DTH) to the M. avium cytoplasmic protein antigen (CPA). Spleen cells harvested at increasing time periods after the M. avium infection were tested for their blastogenic responsiveness to PHA and M. avium CPA. The presence of suppressor T cells within the heavily infected spleens was demonstrated by means of cell-mixing experiments before and after treatment of the anergic spleen cells with anti-Thy-1.2 antiserum and complement. The specificity of the suppressor T cells was measured in terms of their ability to depress responsiveness to sheep erythrocytes and an allograft challenge. Initially, the suppressor T cell population affected all of the T cell-mediated responses but as the infection progressed, so the non-specific host responses tended to return gradually towards normal, whereas the specific M. avium CPA-mediated suppression persisted largely unchanged.