Clonal and Cellular Dynamics in Germinal Centers.

Immunology Interest Group A native of Brazil, Gabriel Victora has a Bachelor and Master's degree in classical piano from the Mannes College of Music in New York City, a Master in Immunology from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a Ph.D. in Immunology from the New York University Medical School. For the last ten years, his work has focused on B lymphocytes, especially on how antibody affinity matures in the germinal center. This work has earned him the Weintraub Award for graduate research, the Science Magazine/SciLifeLab prize for young scientists (Molecular Biology category), an NIH Director's Early Independence Award, and a Basil O'Connor scholar award from the March of Dimes foundation. Gabriel Victora has been a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research since 2012 and, will become head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Dynamics at the Rockefeller University this Fall. Abstract: Antibodies somatically mutate to attain high affinity in germinal centers (GCs). There, competition between B cell clones and among somatic mutants of each clone drives an increase in average affinity across the population. The extent to which higher-affinity cells eliminating competitors restricts clonal diversity is unknown. By combining multiphoton microscopy and sequencing, we show that tens to hundreds of distinct B cell clones seed each GC, and that GCs lose clonal diversity at widely disparate rates. Furthermore, efficient affinity maturation can occur in the...
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