Mutations make gut antibodies promiscuous

Emilie K Grasset1, Andrea Cerutti1,2,3

  • 1The Immunology Institute, Department of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY.

In this issue, Kabbert et al. (https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.20200275) show that intestinal antibodies from healthy subjects or patients with Crohn's disease cross-target diverse but distinct communities of the gut microbiota through a mechanism involving somatic hypermutation but not germline-encoded polyreactivity.

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