Figure 4.
Increased chimerism in chronically injured epithelium. A: The chimerism in the bronchial epithelium observed in case 5 with squamous metaplasia is compared to case 2 without metaplasia. The higher degree of chimerism in case 5 is obvious from the electropherogram at the bottom. The top electropherogram represents pure recipient’s genotype from the explanted lungs. B: Comparison of the chimerism in peribronchial glands in case 5, in which the glands display reactive epithelial changes, with peribronchial gland chimerism in case 1, which exhibits glands with inflammatory infiltrates but a quite normal morphology of ducts and acini. Top: The morphological appearance of the bronchial and glandular epithelium, respectively. The top electropherograms show the recipient’s allelotype for each case. The bottom electropherograms display representative results obtained for the different cases after laser microdissection. Within the frames are the alleles selected for quantitative evaluation. Black peaks, recipient; hatched peaks, donor; small empty peaks, so called “stutter bands” caused by sliding of the Taq polymerase along the repetitive sequence during the amplification process.