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Large intestinal adenocarcinoma with osseous metaplasia was diagnosed in two horses, a 15-year-old standard bred gelding and a 9-year-old Haflinger mare. Clinically, both animals had displayed weight loss and anaemia. A presumptive diagnosis of abdominal neoplasia was made and the horses were humanely killed. At necropsy, the gelding and the mare were found to have ulcerated tumours growing into the lumen of the caecum and colon, respectively. In the mare, the mass extended through the mesocolon and was evident in the left dorsal and ventral colon. Histopathologically, the tumours consisted of well-differentiated cords of single-layered columnar to cuboidal epithelial cells. Mitotic figures were very uncommon. In both lesions, well-formed bony spicules and osteoid were present in the fibrovascular stroma. The tumours were well-demarcated from surrounding mucosal tissue but had invaded the intestinal wall. Metastases were not observed.

Splenic T cells exposed to concanavalin A (Con A), and subsequently to factors produced by rat spleen cells in response to Con A (Con A sup), acquire the ability to function as helper T (TH) cells in response to xenogeneic erythrocytes (RBC). Help is measured as the reconstitution of the plaque-forming cell response of a spleen cell population depleted of T cells by treatment with anti-Thy-1 serum and complement. We propose that precursor TH cells differentiate during the in vitro treatment into mature TH cells. As differentiation occurs under limiting dilution conditions, an estimation of the precursor frequency should in principle be possible. However, a single-hit Poisson distribution does not fit our data. Instead, we observe, dependent on the T cell concentration, three separate "peaks" of response. In many experiments, using sheep, horse, and chicken RBC as antigens, we reproducibly find these "peaks" at 40-190, 600-3,000, and 20,000-100,000 T cells, placed into limiting dilution cultures, respectively. By various experiments we can show that the helper activity is not due to passively transferred rat factors, but to the titrated cells themselves. The active cell is a T cell that appears to function in an antigen-specific way and to require direct cell contact to do so. It thus resembles the classical helper T cell. As we find precursor TH cells already at very low concentrations of T cells, we titrated the range between 0 and 100 T cells/well carefully. The bent shape of the titration curves does not always allow a statistically satisfying regression analysis, and we therefore cannot estimate precise precursor frequencies from every experiment. However, a common sense argument can be made that these frequencies must be on the order of 1/10-1/100 T cells. We propose that the limiting dilution curves obtained in this system most likely reflect fundamentally important cellular interactions that regulate immunological effector functions. We favor a concept of independently interacting sets of helper and suppressor T cells of various frequencies, but other models are possible.

Limiting dilution (LD) analyses of polyclonally activated T cells yielded results suggesting the existence of multiple paired populations of effector and suppressor precursors for a number of different T cell functions and specificities analyzed. These populations occur at graded frequencies and suppression occurs within a pair but not between pairs. In this paper, we establish the mathematical basis for the interpretation of these multi-component limiting dilution results. First, we derive equations for a number of mathematical models and identify one model that both makes biological sense and can be used to reproduce experimental data. Second, within this model, we identify parameters such as the frequency of suppressive cells and the number of suppressive cells required for suppression. The results suggest that within each paired population, suppressor precursors are 20 times more frequent that effector precursors. Furthermore, a similar but variable excess of suppressor cells is required for suppression to become effective. Together with the high frequency (1/50-1/500) of most effector T cell precursors previously reported, the results suggest that up to 40% of the T cells can become involved in suppression of an antigen-specific effector T cell population. These studies may provide exact estimates for predictions to be tested in experiments on immune regulation.