Evolution of antibody affinity maturation

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Two desired outcomes of vaccination are: 1) immunologic memory, whereby there is a large increase in the number of long-lived immune memory cells that will be able to recognize the disease that you were vaccinated against. 2) improved recognition of disease organism by tweaking the genes of the molecules used to recognize the pathogen. This latter process termed antibody affinity maturation involves the intentional mutation of a select part of our genome in the hopes of improving the design of the antibodies that it encodes, so they can better bind to a pathogen that the organism has been exposed to. Mutation of the genome is a delicate business that must be tightly regulated so that unintended mutation doesn't lead to cancers or autoimmune diseases.