Multiplicity of germline genes specifying a group of related mouse kappa chains with implications for the generation of immunoglobulin diversity.

The number of germline genes specifying the variable sequences of the Vkappa21 group of light chains was determined by saturation hybridisation analysis to be four to six. This gene multiplicity is considerably less than the total variability in the group, indicating that kappa-chain diversity is generated by somatic mutations in both framework and complementarity-determining (hypervariable) regions.