The Common Key to Class-Switch Recombination and Somatic Hypermutation: Discovery of AID and Its Role in Antibody Gene Diversification

Abstract

The mechanisms by which lymphocytes engineer their genomes, allowing the adaptive immune system to respond to an enormous spectrum of Ags, have been one of the most exciting topics in immunology. By the late 1990s, a detailed understanding of V(D)J recombination mechanisms, found to be controlled by