A model of the early evolution of soma-to-germline feedback

The V-genes of the immunoglobulin locus in vertebrates code for a part of the heavy and light chain variable regions of antibodies and are extremely variable. Steele (1979) has developed a theory that explains the evolution of adaptive immune response by a soma-to-germline flow of cDNAs derived from somatically mutated V-genes. Here we model the early evolution of soma-to-germline feedback in a population living in a changing viral environment in terms of the dynamics of an initially rare genetic modifier that controls transfer of V-genes to germ cells' DNA. It is shown that a modifier invades the population and creates a great variety of V-genes if the environment follows stepwise temporal changes, i.e. a soma-to-germline feedback machinery evolves in a population if newly derived V-alleles still play a role in protecting the population against foreign antigens in some following generations. The distribution of the age of V-genes evolves to a bell-shaped curve the width and the maximum of which depend mainly on selection strength. Two phases of modifier evolution are distinguished. In the first phase, the dynamics are slow while the number of different V-genes is small. In the second phase, when a sufficiently large number of different V-genes is created, the modifier increases faster in frequency. Linkage of V-genes and the modifier enhances the rate of evolution.