"This effect is based on a step in antibody maturation called somatic hypermutation," says Dr. Matthias Bruhn, first author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for ...

Somatic hypermutation, gene conversion and class-switch recombination are genetic rearrangements that generate the molecular diversity of immunoglobulin genes underlying the human immune system. In ...

A recent paper in Nature sheds welcome light on the mechanism of somatic hypermutation by documenting the participation of double-strand DNA breaks. The antibody response, which occurs in ...

They also show that models learned from nonsynonymous mutations and from out-of-frame sequences are different, prompting new questions about germinal center function. Strengths of the study include an ...

The mutable vaccine is a DNA vaccine that encodes a microbial antigen that diversifies in B cells undergoing somatic hypermutation. The variants are secreted from plasma cells and in turn evoke ...

B cell germinal centres achieve a balance between clonal expansion and sequence diversification by suppressing somatic hypermutation during proliferative clonal bursts. It is important to ...