Red fluorescent and green fluorescent microspheres were instilled into separate but adjacent areas of dog lung lobes. After 7 days, the tracheobronchial lymph nodes that drained both of the instilled areas contained many macrophages with all red or all green microspheres but rarely both. This indicates that the particles did not translocate passively and that lung macrophages phagocytized the microspheres in the lung and carried them to the tracheobronchial lymph nodes. In addition, two populations of pulmonary alveolar macrophages (PAM's), one that had phagocytized red microspheres in vivo and one that had phagocytized green microspheres, were lavaged from the lungs of dogs, mixed into one population, and instilled back into a previously unexposed lung lobe of the same dogs. As in the first experiment, the tracheobronchial lymph nodes that drained the instilled area contained numerous macrophages with either all red or all green microspheres. This suggested that the instilled PAM's had migrated to the tracheobronchial lymph nodes. Thus, lung macrophages, including PAM's probably play a critical role in the induction of lung immunity and in protection from disease by determining particle translocation.

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Diesel exhaust (DE) is a known pulmonary carcinogen in rats, and the carcinogenic response is known to require the presence of soot. Many estimates of human lung cancer risk from inhaled DE have been developed from rat bioassay data or from the comparative mutagenic potencies of DE soot extract and known human chemical carcinogens. To explore the importance of the DE soot-associated organic compounds in the lung tumor response of rats, male and female F344 rats were exposed chroni cally to diluted whole DE or aerosolized carbon black (CB) 16 hr/day, 5 days/week at target particle concentrations of 2.5 mg/m 3 (LDE, LCB) or 6.5 mg/m 3 (HDE, HCB) or to filtered air. The CB served as a surrogate for the elemental carbon matrix of DE soot. Considering both the mass fraction of solvent-extractable matter and its mutagenicity in the Ames Salmonella assay, the mutagenicity in revertants per unit particle mass of the CB was three orders of magnitude less than that of the DE soot. Both DE soot and CB particles accumulated progressively in the lungs of exposed rats, but the rate of accumulation was higher for DE soot. In general, DE and CB caused similar, dose-related, nonneoplastic lesions. CB and DE caused significant, exposure concentration-related increases, of similar magnitudes, in the incidences and prevalences of the same types of malignant and benign lung neoplasms in female rats. The incidences of neoplasms were much lower in males than females, and the mci dences were slightly higher among DE- than CB-exposed males. Survival was shortened in the CB-exposed males, and the short ened survival may have suppressed the expression of carcinoge nicity as measured by crude incidence. Logistic regression mod eling did not demonstrate significant differences between the carcinogenic potencies of CB and DE in either gender. The re sults suggest that the organic fraction of DE may not play an important role in the carcinogenicity of DE in rats.