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Antibody Diversity

"Antibody Diversity" is a descriptor in the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Descriptors are arranged in a hierarchical structure, which enables searching at various levels of specificity.

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The phenomenon of immense variability characteristic of ANTIBODIES. It enables the IMMUNE SYSTEM to react specifically against the essentially unlimited kinds of ANTIGENS it encounters. Antibody diversity is accounted for by three main theories: (1) the Germ Line Theory, which holds that each antibody-producing cell has genes coding for all possible antibody specificities, but expresses only the one stimulated by antigen; (2) the Somatic Mutation Theory, which holds that antibody-producing cells contain only a few genes, which produce antibody diversity by mutation; and (3) the Gene Rearrangement Theory, which holds that antibody diversity is generated by the rearrangement of IMMUNOGLOBULIN VARIABLE REGION gene segments during the differentiation of the ANTIBODY-PRODUCING CELLS.


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This graph shows the total number of publications written about "Antibody Diversity" by people in this website by year, and whether "Antibody Diversity" was a major or minor topic of these publications.
Bar chart showing 12 publications over 10 distinct years, with a maximum of 2 publications in 1998 and 2011
To see the data from this visualization as text, click here.