Immune System Modelling and Simulation
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tetramer exist. It happens that an induced mutation, changing
one amino acid (out of total 1021) in the N-terminal region of
a monomer, will completely impede the enzymatic activity.
It turned out that the mutated amino acid was vital for the
conformational architecture of the molecule. Could some ‘patch’
cure the damage? This was a quite crazy question, but Rotman
and Celada asked it anyway [34] in July 1967, in Providence, RI
and the answer was, ‘Yes’. Antiserum, anti wild type Beta Gal,
was able to produce a substantial amount of catalytic activity,
with an impressive rise of three orders of magnitude! Not all
antibodies in the polyclonal serum were able to do this, but of the
fraction of the ‘conforming’ ...