Evolution of antibody affinity maturation

接种疫苗的两个预期结果是：1)免疫记忆，由此长期免疫记忆细胞的数量大量增加，这些细胞将能够识别你接种过疫苗的疾病。2)通过调整用于识别病原体的分子的基因，提高对疾病生物体的识别。后一种过程被称为抗体亲和成熟，它涉及我们基因组的一个选择部分的有意突变，希望改进它编码的抗体的设计，这样它们就能更好地与生物体接触过的病原体结合。基因组突变是一件微妙的事情，必须严格监管，以免意外突变导致癌症或自身免疫性疾病。

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.