Measurement of Somatic Hypermutation Induced By C3d Adjuvant

Sai Reddy of ETH Zürich in Switzerland will study how low levels of the immune system-stimulating molecule C3d attached to a protein from a pathogen (antigen) can lead to the production of large numbers of pathogen-fighting antibodies and thereby boost the efficacy of vaccines. They hypothesize that it involves stimulating the process of somatic hypermutation in antibody-producing B cells, which results in high titers of antibodies that can bind very strongly to the target pathogen. They will generate the C3d protein fused to a number of different antigens, use them to immunize mice, and subsequently analyze somatic hypermutation using high-throughput sequencing of antibodies and bioinformatics methods.