Jean-Claude WEILL, Professor, Faculty of the Necker Sick Children’s Medicine of the University René Descartes Claude-Agnes, REYNAUD, Director of Research, National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Necker Faculty of Medicine for Sick Children of the University René Descartes; Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) Unité 373, Faculté de Médecine Necker-Enfants Malades, Paris, France To these scientists we owe two major discoveries concerning the elucidation of the diversity of the genetic repertory of immunoglobulins. Indeed, Weill and Reynaud have established that antibody diversity results from pseudogenes conversion as much as from other generators of diversity as gene junction and recombination. These investigators have also demonstrated that localized mutations are responsible for the diversification of the pre-immune repertoire of sheep B cells, which was surprisingly found similar in the absence of antigen. These two discoveries have changed a paradigm of immunology and continue to have a profound influence on the scientific community. |