Mechanisms that generate human immunoglobulin diversity operate from the 8th week of gestation in fetal liver.

The repertoire of immunoglobulin expressed very early in human development was approached by cloning and sequencing 55 rearranged and 11 germ-line VH transcripts, after amplification by polymerase chain reaction of cDNA libraries derived from two fetal livers at 8 and 13 weeks of gestation. All families with the exception of VH2, were expressed as soon as 8 weeks, with preferential usage of certain germ-line genes. Very few somatic mutations, randomly localized, were identified. By contrast, in a series of clones derived from the same VDJ rearrangement using the VH6 family, extensive mutations had taken place, mostly accumulated in the third complementarity-determining region (CDR3) suggesting that the specialized enzymatic machinery was at hand very early during human development. Some other characteristics of the fetal repertoire also emerged, namely increased usage of JH3 and JH2, as compared to the adult pattern, where JH4 is dominant and reduced length of the D/CDR3 regions. All D gene families were identified, and their usage frequently involved D-D fusions. N diversity was present very early, and increased with age. Identification of germ-line transcripts pertaining to all six VH families including pseudogenes, in the E55 library, revealed a population very different as compared to rearranged gene transcripts. This suggests that a large portion of VH locus is accessible for transcription, bringing no evidence of correlation between preferential rearrangement of a given VH gene and its localization in the locus.