Regeneration and Differentiation of Hamster Tracheal Epithelium Used Anti--Brdu Monoclonal Antibody After Mechanical Injury

The ventral quadrant of the tracheal epithelium of the hamster,about one fourth of tracheal mucosa, was denuded by a venous needle reformed.The stains were made with HE, PAS, and PAS-anti Brdu immunohis-tochemic technique. At the 0 h circumference cell number (CCN) was 927. 25.From 6 h post injured the viable cells changed in shapes and migrated from themargin to wound site. By 24 h the wound area was completely covered by a sin-gle layer of non-ciliated flattened cells, then an expotential increassing in cellregeneration occured in wound site by 48 h. The CCN had been restored to thelevel of control (1373), and the proliferative cell, composed of polygonal epi-dermoid metaplasia, 3～4 layers and reached a peak (338.8). The secretoryand ciliated cells appeared gradually from 72 h post injury, the epithelium re-stored to the normal epithelial architecture by one week post injury. In our pre-sent study either in control and non-injured epithelium or in all stages of woundsite about 70% of the Brdu positive cells contained small or confluent PAS posi-tive granules were observed. This fact indicated that secretory cells play a im-portant role in proliferation after mechanical injury and maintaining the normaltracheal pseudostratified epithelium.