Recombination Events That Activate, Diversify, and Delete Immunoglobulin Genes
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
Somatic recombination is a central event in the activation of immunoglobulin genes and also contributes to their diversity (Dreyer and Bennett 1965; Hozumi and Tonegawa 1976; Rabbitts and Forster 1978; Seidman and Leder 1978). In the κ light chain of the mouse, this process unites one of a germ-line repertoire of several hundred separately encoded variable (V)-region genes (Seidman et al. 1978a; Valbuena et al. 1978) to one of a series of four active joining (J)-region segments encoded close to a single constant (C)-region sequence (Max et al. 1979; Sakano et al. 1979).
Our knowledge of how immunoglobulin genes operate has been guided by a remarkable series of observations and a powerful hypothesis put forward to explain them. These observations derived from immunochemical studies that defined the V and C regions of immunoglobulin heavy and light chains. The most telling hypothesis followed from Dreyer and Bennett's (1965) concern about the...
