Diversification and selection mechanisms for the production of protein repertoires: lessons from the immune system.

The physiological mechanism for producing antigen-specific antibodies is based on a two-phase neo-Darwinian process: the first phase consists of diversity generation (formation of the repertoire), and the second phase is antigen-mediated selection. In this article, we consider how the natural immunoglobulin gene-diversification processes can be exploited both in vivo and in vitro in order to allow the generation of novel antibody (and heterologous protein) repertoires.