Antibodies are a key component of our immune system, but an antibody is far from “just” an antibody. They can recognize an infinite variety of threats and adjust how they act depending on whether the intruder is a virus, parasite or bacterium. They can fine-tune this recognition and build immunological memory, making it much harder for the same threat to make us ill if it returns. Yet this powerful tool can also cause disease when antibodies react to harmless pollen and trigger allergy, or attack the body’s own components and cause autoimmune disease.

In my PhD, I have studied how antibodies are formed and how they gain their special properties by focusing on the cells that produce them: B cells. We have developed a new system to study human B cells, identified which chemical features are needed for effective recognition, and investigated how an appropriate antibody function is chosen. We gained particularly important insights from blood samples from a patient with a rare defect in the enzyme that fine-tunes antibodies in B cells.

The PhD study was completed at Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Aarhus University.

This summary was prepared by the PhD student, Kenneth Green.

Time: Wednesday, 21 January at 13.15
Place: Building 1162, room 013, Auditorium A, Aarhus University, Ole Worms Allé 4, 8000 Aarhus C
Title of PhD thesis: Explorations in B-cell Immunity - From antigen recognition to adaptive specificity and effector function
Contact information: Kenneth Green, e-mail: Kgreen@biomed.au.dk, tel.: +45 53 60 96 50
Members of the assessment committee:
Professor Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam, Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Professor Torben Barington, Department of Clinical Immunology, Odense University Hospital and University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Professor Ditlev E. Brodersen (chair), Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Aarhus University, Denmark
Main supervisor:
Professor Jørgen Kjems, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics and Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO), Aarhus University, Denmark
Co-supervisor:
Associate Professor Søren Egedal Degn, Department of Biomedicine, Aarhus University, Denmark
Language: The PhD dissertation will be defended in English

The defence is public.
The PhD thesis is available for reading at the Graduate School of Natural Sciences/GSNS, Ny Munkegade 120, building 1521, 8000 Aarhus C