Hello everyone–
I made a blog post about some recent work from our group, in which I tried to summarize the motivation and methods with a minimum of jargon:
Immunological take-home: if you are doing expensive experiments based on computational reconstructions, don’t rely on point estimates.
Please post your comments and questions here! I hope this stimulates some discussion.
Erick
Mutation rates are very different in childhood (as you know) when the thymus is working with bone marrow & naive immune repitoire. The paper below may be of interest (or not!). Neat work! As I read your post, I can’t help thinking about how complex it must be to model a mutation rate when B cells are being stimulated by a hijacked T cell (with HIV DNA integrated into its cellular DNA) as T cell numbers are swiftly dropping! Phew! Thanks for the wonderful work you are all doing.
The Frequency of Mutations Increases during Early Childhood
During early childhood, the peripheral B-cell compartment changes significantly, with an increase in the absolute numbers of B cells and the percentage of memory B cells (36). However, SHM has not been studied extensively in children and adults. We found that the percentage of mutations in both IGA and IGG transcripts increased during early childhood and remained around 7% (range 5.6–9.4%) from the age of about 6 years onward (Figure 1).