ABSTRACT
Organ cryopreservation is a frontier discipline both in cryobiology and in pathology. Cryopreservation refers to preservation at cryogenic temperatures, which for our present purposes will be considered any temperature below about -100°C. This chapter shows that cryoprotective agents-induced stress is coupled to cooling stress and that proper balance of the imposition of these two stresses can avoid both cryoprotectant toxicity and cooling injury. Several years of effort have resulted in a minimum-toxicity combination of cryoprotective agents for rabbit kidneys that is decisively less toxic than any one chemical agent alone. The chapter examines the possibility that cooling injury involves the induction of apoptosis based on the observation of Nagle et al. that the cooling of V79 Chinese hamster fibroblasts resulted in a rapid onset of apoptosis that was fully blocked by prior exposure of the cells to zinc sulfate.
