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Abstract

For almost twenty years now, the clonal selection theory (Jerne, 1955; Burnet, 1959; Lederberg, 1959) has been the major paradigm for most immunologists. The clonal selection theory has a great appeal to logic and the elegance of simplicity, and it is in fact able to account for a vast body of data. The central idea of clonal selection is that the immune system is a library of precommitted clones, able to manufacture a pair of V-region polypeptides (VH and VL). It is essential to the clonal selection theory that each member of the clone expresses the same pair of V genes.

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© 1981 Plenum Press, New York

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Urbain, J., Wuilmart, C., Cazenave, PA. (1981). Idiotypic Regulation in Immune Networks. In: Inman, F.P., Mandy, W.J. (eds) Contemporary Topics in Molecular Immunology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3917-5_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3917-5_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4684-3919-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4684-3917-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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