✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Somatic Hypermutation and Affinity Maturation – Pathologia

pathologia.ed.ac.uk · 917 words · saved by 1 readers

We have covered plasma and memory cell formation through the germinal centre, but if you remember correctly there were two other processes mentioned at the start not yet covered in detail – somatic hypermutation and affinity maturation. You may have wondered while making your way through the ‘Germinal Centre’ section exactly how B cells change their antigen specificity. B cells have developed a clever mechanism of introducing target mutations into their B cell receptor gene sequence while cycling through the germinal centre, leading to a change in receptor specificity. This process is given the fancy name of ‘somatic hypermutation’. The B cell receptor (BCR) is coded for by different gene regions, named the ‘V’, ‘D’ and ‘J’ regions. The one we are concerned with here is the ‘V’ region; this is the region which codes for the variable part of the receptor and hence determines what antigen the receptor will bind to. During somatic hypermutation, point mutations are introduced into this va

Somatic Hypermutation and Affinity Maturation – Pathologia Skip to content This topic is part of the module(s) : Inflammation and immunology Somatic Hypermutation and Affinity Maturation Author(s): David Dorward , Hannah McManus and Genevieve McMahon Learning outcomes By the end of this CAL you should understand: how the BCR is coded for. the processes which are used to introduce variety into the gene product; somatic hypermutation. affinity maturation and its role in the development of a more efficient immune response. how this links to the activity of the germinal centre. Introduction

Explore this link on the map →

related reading