New insights on how chromatin scanning generates diverse antibody repertoires
Researchers in the laboratory of Frederick Alt of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine (PCMM) at Children’s Hospital Boston made a groundbreaking discovery at the nexus of chromatin biology and immunology. Their work, recently published in Nature, showed that physiological deregulation of the WAPL chromatin-maintenance factor allows developing B lymphocytes to scan linearly through very long chromosomal loops to find and join gene segments that form diverse antibody repertoires. Recently the Alt group discovered that V(D)J recombination and Ig...
Source: harvard.edu