ON THE IN VITRO ACCUMULATION OF INORGANIC IODIDE BY SURVIVING THYROID TISSUE WITH RADIOACTIVE IODINE AS INDICATOR¹

Abstract

THE EARLY WORK of Marine (1915; Marine and Feiss, 1915) as well as the more recent observations with radioactive iodine (Hamilton and Soley, 1939; Hertz, Roberts, Means and Evans, 1940; LeBlond and Sue, 1940; Perlman, Morton and Chaikoff, 1941) leaves no doubt that the thyroid gland possesses an extraordinary capacity for the rapid removal of large amounts of circulating iodide. This iodine-concentrating capacity of thyroid tissue has not as yet received a satisfactory explanation. To obtain information on the mechanism involved, an investigation has been made here of the uptake of iodine and its subsequent conversion to thyroxine and diiodotyrosine by surviving thyroid slices in the presence of cyanide, sulfide, azide and sulfanilamide. It was shown earlier that these compounds inhibited the formation of thyroxine and diiodotyrosine by thyroid tissue, the first 3 by interfering with the cytochrome-cytochrome oxidase system (Schachner, Franklin and Chaikoff, 1943), the sulfanilamide by interfering in a manner as yet unidentified (Franklin and Chaikoff, 1943).