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Dual role for Bcl-2 in antibody affinity maturation

Nature Cell Biology volume 7, pages 326–327 (2005)Cite this article

To the editor:

A recent paper in Nature Cell Biology by Youn et al. described the suppression of mismatch repair (MMR) activity by Bcl-2, and discussed the possible effect of this on genome stability in oncogenesis1. This finding also has fascinating implications for the mechanisms that generate antibody diversity in germinal centres, because the germinal centre reaction characteristically involves downregulation of Bcl-2 to permit the positive selection of high-affinity antibody variants, and the antibody variants are initially created by hypermutation, which involves MMR activity.

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Figure 1: Mutation spectra of immunoglobulin (IG) genes that have been mutated in the presence and absence of Bcl-2 expression.

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  1. Department of Immunobiology, King's College London, GKT Medical School, Guy's Campus, London, SE1 9RT, UK

    Deborah Dunn-Walters & Jo Spencer

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  1. Deborah Dunn-Walters
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  2. Jo Spencer
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Correspondence to Deborah Dunn-Walters.

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Dunn-Walters, D., Spencer, J. Dual role for Bcl-2 in antibody affinity maturation. Nat Cell Biol 7, 326–327 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb0405-326b

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