How are antibodies created by the human body?
In: 2
Antibodies are produced by specialized white blood cells called B cells. When an antigen comes into contact with a B cell, it causes the B cell to divide and clone. These cloned B cells — or plasma cells — release millions of antibodies into your bloodstream and lymph system.
Antibodies are produced by specialized white blood cells called B cells. When an antigen comes into contact with a B cell, it causes the B cell to divide and clone. These cloned B cells — or plasma cells — release millions of antibodies into your bloodstream and lymph system.
1. Antibodies are initially created through [a random process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination). Specialized immune cells randomly rearrange the DNA that encodes the antibody proteins. These antibodies are not particularly useful since they do not bind to anything with high specificity.
2. [A selection process occurs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_maturation). Now those random antibodies are stuck on the outside of the immune cells, when they stick to something the cell proliferates and undergoes intentional mutation of the gene encoding the antibody leading to slight variations of it which can then be selected further.
For example, say you are infected with a new virus. Some of the randomly made antibodies will stick to it a little bit, but not very well. Those that do sick, or rather the immune cells they are attached to will proliferate and mutate. Some of the new variants of those antibodies will stick even better, those cells will proliferate and mutate and so on until you have really good quality antibodies that stick to the virus. This is what happens when you are sick and it is what vaccines are doing ahead of time/why they are so useful.
1. Antibodies are initially created through [a random process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination). Specialized immune cells randomly rearrange the DNA that encodes the antibody proteins. These antibodies are not particularly useful since they do not bind to anything with high specificity.
2. [A selection process occurs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_maturation). Now those random antibodies are stuck on the outside of the immune cells, when they stick to something the cell proliferates and undergoes intentional mutation of the gene encoding the antibody leading to slight variations of it which can then be selected further.
For example, say you are infected with a new virus. Some of the randomly made antibodies will stick to it a little bit, but not very well. Those that do sick, or rather the immune cells they are attached to will proliferate and mutate. Some of the new variants of those antibodies will stick even better, those cells will proliferate and mutate and so on until you have really good quality antibodies that stick to the virus. This is what happens when you are sick and it is what vaccines are doing ahead of time/why they are so useful.
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