Antibody somatic evolution in computational vaccine design

26 April 2013

Thomas Kepler
Department of Microbiology
Boston University School of Medicine

Abstract

Immunoglobulins play a key role in host defense against pathogenic microorganisms, viruses, and neoplasms and exhibit enormous diversity within a single individual. Immunoglobulin genes are generated stochastically during B cell ontogeny by rearrangement of gene segments and undergo further diversification post-activation through the Darwinian process known as affinity maturation. I will discuss how affinity maturation has shaped the immunoglobulin genotype-phenotype map, and describe our attempts to manipulate affinity maturation in vaccines against HIV-1.

current theory lunch schedule