Characteristics of natural killer cells in the murine intestinal epithelium and lamina propria

Highly purified populations of lymphocytes were obtained from the murine intestinal mucosa using EDTA-collagenase isolation procedures in combination with discontinuous density centrifugation. Intraepithelial lymphocytes (IEL) were separated from lamina propria lymphocytes (LPL) and, within these two populations, fractions enriched or depleted in gut granular lymphocytes (gGL) were obtained. Using these cells in cytotoxic assays, it was shown that both IEL and LPL possess natural killer (NK) activity, and this was associated with gGL. The major effector cells of gut NK activity appeared to be Thy-1.2+, Lyt-1.1-, and Lyt-2.1-. The susceptibility of gut NK cells to anti-Thy-1.2 plus complement (C) was significantly higher than that of splenic NK cells. In contrast, anti-asialo GM1 and anti-NK-1.2 plus C only slightly affected the gut NK activity. Thus, the phenotype of the gut NK cells appears to be different from the splenic one and provides further evidence for NK heterogeneity and establishes the compartmentalization of one NK subpopulation. Beige mice, deficient in splenic NK activity, also had very low gut NK activity. W/Wv mice, which lack mast cell precursors, had normal numbers of gGL and diminished, but still present, gut and splenic NK activity. This deficiency did not segregate with the genes responsible for the basic hemopoietic stem cell defect, and these results argue against a close ontogenetic relationship between IEL, gGL, and intestinal mucosal mast cells. The relevance of these observations to the cell lineage of the effector cell of gut NK activity is discussed.