Pretreatment of pancreatic islets in 95% oxygen culture depletes graft-asso
ciated APCs and leads to indefinite allograft acceptance in immunocompetent
recipients. As such, the APC-depleted allograft represents a model of peri
pheral alloantigen presentation in the absence of donor-derived costimulati
on, Over time, a state of donor-specific tolerance develops in which recipi
ents are resistant to donor APC-induced graft rejection, Thus, persistence
of the graft is sufficient to induce tolerance independent of other immune
interventions. Donor-specific tolerance could be adoptively transferred to
immune-deficient SCID recipient mice transplanted with fresh immunogenic is
let allografts, indicating that the original recipient was not simply "igno
rant" of donor antigens, Interestingly, despite the fact that the original
islet allograft presented only MHC class I alloantigens, CD8(+) T cells obt
ained from tolerant animals readily collaborated with naive CD4(+) T cells
to reject donor-type islet grafts. Conversely, tolerant CD4(+) T cells fail
ed to collaborate effectively with naive CD8(+) T cells for the rejection o
f donor-type grafts. In conclusion, the MHC class I+, II- islet allograft p
aradoxically leads to a change in the donor-reactive CD4 T cell Subset and
not in the CD8 subset, We hypothesize that the tolerant state is not due to
direct class I alloantigen presentation to CD8 T cells but, rather, occurs
via the indirect pathway of donor Ag presentation to CD4 T cells in the co
ntext of host MHC class II molecules.