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A fundamental question about the mechanism of antibody formation is concerned with the manner of inheritance of the structural genes which code for the different antibody molecules. Are the structural genes inherited as many preformed units (germ-line theory), or are only a few genes inherited, and diversity generated from these during differentiation of the immune system (somatic theory)? This is basically a question about evolution of proteins, and we have approached it from this point of view.
Hood et al. (Sun,) studied this question.