4 ms·

Do we know how exactly this happens? How fast this process "converges"? How big is the search space and how fast new candidates are generated?

• tux3 5y ago
  About 3e11 combinations are possible, about 10 billions different antibodies will be generated by a human body (numbers I just sourced from Wikipedia). The shuffling is done by recombination, which means joining segments of DNA in a random fashion (a similar recombination process is actually used for DNA repair, though with somewhat less randomness!) There's a lot more to say about all of this, but I don't know how much immunology I can usefully describe in a few HN comments =]
  • mmastrac 5y ago
    This is a very helpful start for me, thank you
  • cipheredStones 5y ago
    (10 billion (1e9) / 3e11 ~= 3%, for those like me who don't have powers of 10 memorized.) Does that imply that there's a good chance someone's immune system will just fail to generate any appropriate antibodies against a novel intruder? Or does the "fuzzy matching" aspect mean that exploring a small percentage of the space mean you're very likely to get at least some degree of success?