BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Activation-induced cytidine deaminase is essential for somatic hypermutation and class switch recombination of the immunoglobulin genes in B cells. It has been proposed that aberrant targeting of the somatic hypermutation machinery is instrumental in initiation and progression of B-cell non Hodgkin's lymphomas. In this study, we investigated the B-cell receptor and the...

Somatic hypermutation and isotype switch recombination occur in germinal center B cells, are linked to transcription, and are similarly affected by deficiency in MutS homologue (MSH)2. Class-switch recombination is abrogated by disruption of genes encoding components of the catalytic subunit of DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK(cs))/Ku complex and likely involves nonhomologous end joining (N...

Immunoglobulin genes experience Darwinian evolution twice. In addition to the germline evolution all genes experience, immunoglobulins are subjected, upon exposure to antigen, to somatic hypermutation. This is accompanied by selection for high affinity to the eliciting antigen and frequently results in a significant increase in the specificity of the responding population. The hypermutation mec...

conclusions according to this study, igvh3 mutation was found to be prevalent (although a correlation was found to exist between the patients’ survival and igvh mutation, it was not statistically significant). we can conclude that clinical methods are still valuable to predict the prognosis of patients with cll. given the high cost and need for specialized laboratory, determining the cost and v...

Somatic hypermutation and class switch recombination cause genetic alterations in immunoglobulin (Ig) genes, which underlie the generation of the secondary antibody repertoire in B lymphocytes. Both processes require activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID), whose mechanism of action in not yet known in detail, but which mediates the accumulation of point mutations in the Ig locus. This high...

Rapid identification of residues that influence antibody expression and thermostability is often needed to move promising therapeutics into the clinic. To establish a method that can assess small expression differences, we developed a Bacterial Antibody Display (BAD) system that overcomes previous limitations, enabling the use of full-length formats for antibody and antigen in a live cell setti...

The relationship between hypnotizability and somatic illness was measured in 45 college students. Several weeks after completing the Waterloo-Stanford Group C Scale (WSGC), participants filled out a somatic-complaint checklist and measures of psychopathology. Results indicated a positive correlation between hypnotizability and somatic illness, and the relationship was stronger for female partic...

the Ig loci undergo several molecular events. The somatic hypermutation mechanism is induced, causing somatic mutations to accumulate in and around the V regions at the average rate of ti10-3/bp/div (1, 2) . Later, this mechanism is turned off, as mutation rates drop sharply to <10 -5/ by/div and perhaps as low as <5 x 10-$/bp/div. (3-5) . The IgH constant region undergoes deletional rearrangem...