Millionfold Mutations Sharpen Antibodies

When your immune system fights an infection, it cranks up the mutation rate during antibody production by a factor of 1,000,000 and then has the resulting antibodies compete with each other, so this natural selection process creates highly specific antibodies for the virus. Immunologists call this somatic hypermutation, and it floods the variable regions of antibody genes in activated B cells with point mutations so that only the cells whose receptors bind the invading antigen most tightly survive and multiply.

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