The differences between the structural repertoires of VH germ-line gene segments of mice and humans:: Implication for the molecular mechanism of the immune response

Although human and murine antibodies are similar when considering their diversification strategies, they differ in the proportion by which kappa and lambda type chains are present in their receptive V-L repertoires. It has been shown that this difference implies a divergence in the structural repertoire of the kappa and lambda genes of these species. Nonetheless, the differences in V-H have not been systematically studied. In this paper a systematic characterization of the V-H structural repertoire of mice is made? so that a comparison with the V-H structural repertoire of humans, described in detail elsewhere, could be properly accomplished. Our study shows the structural repertoire of mice to be dominated by canonical structure class 1-2 (similar to 60%), while in humans the dominant one is class 1-3 (similar to 40%). Analysis of the evolutionary relationships between human and mice suggest that this divergence may have a functional meaning. The implications of such findings are discussed. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.