[Somatic hypermutagenesis in immunoglobulin genes. I. Connection of somatic mutations with repeats. A statistical...

Based on the analysis of a number of immunoglobulin genes' nucleotide sequences, it has been suggested, that somatic mutations emerge by means of imperfect duplexes correction, formed by mispairing of complementary regions of direct and inverted repeats. In the present work provides new data, confirming this mechanism of somatic hypermutagenesis. It has been shown that the presented sample of V- and J-segments of immunoglobulin genes is abundant in nonrandom imperfect direct repeats and complementary palindromes. To prove the connection of somatic mutations with the correction of imperfect duplexes, made up by the regions of these repeats, we have developed the method of statistical weights, permitting us to analyse the samples of mutations and repeats and to reveal the reliability of the connection between them. Using this method we have investigated the collection of 203 nucleotide substitutions in V- and J-segments and have shown a statistically reliable (P less than 10(-4) connection of these mutation positions with imperfect repeats.