Discovering the Role of the Major Histocompatibility Complex in the Immune Response

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Abstract
The discovery that genes in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) play an important role in the immune response depended on the chance interaction of several unrelated events. The first, and most important, was the decision by Michael Sela to synthesize a series of branched, multichain, synthetic polypeptides based on a backbone of poly-l-lysine. The prototype compound, (T,G)-A–L, was tipped with short random sequences of tyrosine and glutamic acid. This resulted in a restricted range of antigenic determinants composed of only two or three amino acids with a variable length—ideal for binding to the peptide binding groove of MHC class II molecules. The second was the decision by John Humphrey to immunize various strains of rabbits with this synthetic polypeptide. Two of these rabbit strains showed very large quantitative differences in antibody response to (T,G)-A–L. In transferring this system to inbred mouse strains, the third bit of good fortune was the availability at the National Institute of Med...

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