The mechanism of histamine release / W.D.M. Paton.

  • William Paton
Date:
[1956?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mechanism of histamine release / W.D.M. Paton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    animal to cause release, which produce specific antibodies, and which are usually of protein nature or are able to react with proteins in the body to form an effective antigen. Second are those processes which produce frank damage to tissues, such as venoms, bacterial toxins, or direct trauma. One might, of course, argue that the mere release of the normal tissue constituent constitutes “damage”. But we are concerned here with a more radical affair, such as the appear¬ ance of cellular debris in the effluent from a perfused organ; the pouring out of fluid from the trachea instead of a pul¬ monary vein; or the production of necrosis of a tissue. Third are proteolytic enzymes. The idea that proteolysis plays a part in anaphylaxis is an old one, taken further when Rocha e Silva, Dragstedt and others found that trypsin, and other proteases, could mobilize histamine from the liver and produce other phenomena similar to anaphylactic shock; they went on to the idea, no longer fashionable but still interesting, that histamine is bound by a peptide bond. Linking up with this we have the complex story of hbrinolysin, which Dr. Ungar will be telling us about. Fourth is a group of surface active materials. Typical members are the detergent Tween 20, which Krantz and his colleagues (1948) showed could cause generalized urticaria in the dog as well as other anaphylactoid signs; and bile salts which Schachter (1952) found to release histamine from cats’ isolated perfused skin. An older representative of this group, of course, is lysolecithin; in their work on cobra venom, Feldberg andKellaway (see Feldberg, 1941) raised the interest¬ ing possibility that a lytic substance of this kind was formed in the anaphylactic process, although attempts to demonstrate its presence were not successful. Whatever the physiological significance of such actions may be, there is no doubt that the interfacial activity of a compound when applied to tissues deserves attention. Fifth is a curious and rather puzzling group of large mole¬ cular compounds. This includes dextran in the rat (Edlund et at., 1952) (and very occasionally in man); polyvinyl-
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