The immune system makes use of two distinct mechanisms to mount an efficient response against almost every foreign macromolecular substance. First, antibodies with their robust immunoglobulin domain architecture provide a rigid scaffold to support six hypervariable loops, capable of forming highly diverse binding sites. Second, an efficient genetic mechanism has evolved to create sequence diversity at the somatic level in a step-wise process, whereby random recombination of an inherited set of gene segments is followed by hypermutation events. Insight into the corresponding molecular mechanisms is developing rapidly and enables adaptation of the emerging principles to the creation of artificial binding proteins in vitro, using the techniques of combinatorial biotechnology. Thus, novel types of receptor molecules have been constructed from alternative scaffolds, including alpha-helical bundle and beta-barrel proteins. These may provide superior tools for the recognition, targeting or separation of a wide range of biomolecular structures or substances in biological research, technology, and even medicine.

中文翻译：

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模仿体液免疫反应。

免疫系统利用两种不同的机制对几乎所有外来大分子物质产生有效的反应。首先，具有强大免疫球蛋白结构域结构的抗体提供了一个刚性支架来支持六个高变环，能够形成高度多样的结合位点。第二，已经发展了一种有效的遗传机制，以逐步的过程在体细胞水平上创造了序列多样性，从而在遗传片段的遗传集合的随机重组之后发生了超突变事件。对相应分子机制的洞察力正在迅速发展，并且可以使用组合生物技术技术使新兴原理适应体外人工结合蛋白的产生。从而，从包括α-螺旋束和β-桶蛋白的替代支架构建了新型受体分子。这些可以为识别，靶向或分离生物学研究，技术甚至医学中的各种生物分子结构或物质提供出色的工具。