In immunology, affinity maturation is the process by which B cells produce antibodies with increased affinity for antigen during the course of an immune response. With repeated exposures to the same antigen, a host will produce antibodies of successively greater affinities. A secondary response can elicit antibodies with several logfold greater affinity than in a primary response. The main principles of the in vivo affinity maturation, namely mutation and selection, are utilised for the biotechnological approach of the in vitro affinity maturation.
Read more about Affinity Maturation: In Vivo Affinity Maturation, In Vitro Affinity Maturation
Famous quotes containing the word affinity:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)