Antibody Class Switching Mediated by Yeast Endonuclease-Generated DNA Breaks

Abstract

Antibody class switching in activated B cells uses class switch recombination (CSR), which joins activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID)–dependent double-strand breaks (DSBs) within two large immunoglobulin heavy chain (IgH) locus switch (S) regions that lie up to 200 kilobases apart. To test postulated roles of S regions and AID in CSR, we generated mutant B cells in which donor Sμ and accepter Sγ1 regions were replaced with yeast I-SceI endonuclease sites. We found that site-specific I-SceI DSBs mediate recombinational IgH locus class switching from IgM to IgG₁ without S regions or AID. We propose that CSR evolved to exploit a general DNA repair process that promotes joining of widely separated DSBs within a chromosome.