Publisher Summary Antibody heavy and light chains are encoded by more than one gene,
thus anticipating the noncontiguous nature of eukaryotic genes and the DNA
rearrangements that are central to the formation of antibody coding regions. Detailed
structural analysis revealed that the amino terminal variable regions of both heavy and light
chains contain three short segments of hypervariability. These hypervariable regions were
shown by X-ray crystallography to comprise the antibody-combining site, whereas the …