Somatic Rearrangements

In the late 1970s, Tonegawa and colleagues in a series of elegant experiments demonstrated that immunoglobulin V and C genes undergo somatic rearrangements to form the complete immunoglobulin gene (Hozumi N, Tonegawa S, Proc Nat Acad Sci 73: 3628- 3632, 1976; Brack C et al., Cell 15:1-14, 1978; Sakano et al., Nature 277:627-633, 1979; Sakano et al., Nature 280: 288-294, 1979; Tonegawa S. Nature 302:575, 1983)