dosSantos, Washington Luis Conrado “Documento produzido em parceria ou por autor vinculado à Fiocruz, mas não consta à informação no documento”.CNPQ (Brasil) and Jameel Rahman was supported by a grant from the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain.Lymphocyte adhesion to CI\TS endothelium is low by comparison with non-CNS endothelium. It has been proposed that this could be due to the high surface charge of brain endothelium, or a low constitutive expression of adhesion molecules. In this study we compared the influence of these factors on lymphocyte adhesion to BEC and aortic endothelium (AEC) in culture. Brain endothelium expresses very low levels of VCAM-1, and lower levels of ICAM- than aortic endothelium. The negative charge differed between the endothelia, but this had a minimal effect on lymphocyte adhesion. The anionic sites were, however, more stable on brain endothelium, remaining unchanged after endothelial cell activation with cytokines, while redistribution was observed on cytokine-activated aortic endothelium.