Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Tas JM
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4938154 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Science (New York, N.Y.) 20160218 6277
Antibodies somatically mutate to attain high affinity in germinal centers (GCs). There, competition between B cell clones and among somatic mutants of each clone drives an increase in average affinity across the population. The extent to which higher-affinity cells eliminating competitors restricts clonal diversity is unknown. By combining multiphoton microscopy and sequencing, we show that tens to hundreds of distinct B cell clones seed each GC and that GCs lose clonal diversity at widely dispa ...[more]