Commonality despite exceptional diversity in the baseline human antibody repertoire.

ABSTRACT: In principle, humans can produce an antibody response to any non-self-antigen molecule in the appropriate context. This flexibility is achieved by the presence of a large repertoire of naive antibodies, the diversity of which is expanded by somatic hypermutation following antigen exposure¹. The diversity of the naive antibody repertoire in humans is estimated to be at least 10¹² unique antibodies². Because the number of peripheral blood B cells in a healthy adult human is on the order of 5 × 10⁹, the circulating B cell population samples only a small fraction of this diversity. Full-scale analyses of human antibody repertoires have been prohibitively difficult, primarily owing to their massive size. The amount of information encoded by all of the

SUBMITTER: Briney B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6411386 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature