The first reported animal model for PBC was observed in an inbred rabbit strain with spontaneous nonsuppurative cholangitis (Tison et al., 1982) . However, the specificity and repertoire of AMA in these rabbits failed to mimic human disease. More recently, PBC epithelial cells were injected intravenously into neonatally thymectomized A/J mice on the premise that altered epithelial cells may initiate disease (Kobashi et al., 1994; Masanaga et al., 1998) . Also, injection of C57BL/6 mice with purified PDH in LPS or injection of recombinant polypeptides of PDC-E2 (Ide et al., 1996; Kimura et al., 1996) have been attempted. However, although AMAs were induced in all of these proposed models, pathological changes in the liver similar to human PBC were not induced. In contrast, a GVHD model for PBC has also been developed which induces histological pathology but serological responses are not specific for mitochondrial antigens (Tanaka et al., 1999; Zeniya, 2000) . As a whole, all animal models developed to date fail to accurately mimic human PBC by the induction of both AMA and intrahepatic liver damage. With these observations in mind, Jones et al. (2000) reported the appearance of autoimmune cholangitis in SJL/J mice following the immunization of bovine PDC-E2, emulsified in CFA. The SJL/J mouse was chosen because it has been successfully used as models of other autoimmune disease, including experimental allergic encephalomyelitis, systemic lupus erythematosus and mercury induced immunopathology (Vidal et al., 1994; Abedi-Valugerdi and Moller, 2000; Winer et al., 2001) . Further, T cells isolated from affected mice displayed a mixed Th1/Th2 response when stimulated with autoantigen in vitro (Jones et al., 1999) . IFN-g is a Th1 cytokine involved in the generation of antigen-specific T cells and has already been shown to be involved in induction of experimental myasthenia gravis (Wang et al., 2000) . Therefore, we hypothesized that injection of exogenous IFN-g would enhance the development of a PBC-like disease in SJL/J mice immunized with bovine PDC-E2. However, we report herein that while SJL/J mice do demonstrate evidence of significant cholangitis, that such cholangitis is antigen non-specific regardless of IFN-g injection and thus not reflective of PBC.