1
Michael C. Nussenzweig is in the Laboratory of Molecular Immunology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10021, USA. nussen@mail.rockefeller.edu
2
Frederick W. Alt is at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Children's Hospital, and The Center for Blood Research and Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA. alt@enders.tch.harvard.edu
Three reactions diversify antibody genes in human somatic cells of the B lineage: VDJ recombination, somatic hypermutation and class-switch recombination. The discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) has led to the elucidation of a unified molecular mechanism for initiation of the last two reactions and suggests why B cells undergoing these reactions are prone to cancer-associated DNA damage.
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