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News and Views
Nature Medicine 10, 1304 - 1305 (2004)
doi:10.1038/nm1204-1304
Antibody diversity: one enzyme to rule them all
Michel C Nussenzweig1 & Frederick W Alt2
- 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. e-mail: nussen@mail.rockefeller.edu
- 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. e-mail: alt@enders.tch.harvard.edu
Abstract
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.
Hundreds of billions of different antibodies are produced to fight off invading pathogens. Two general classes of antigen receptor gene diversification processes in B lymphocytes account for this panopoly antigen-independent and antigen-dependent processes.
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