Paratope

The paratope is the binding site on an antibody that binds to an antigen . It can be characterized by the hypervariable regions (English Complementarity Determining Region , CDR or hypervariable region , HVR ) of the light and heavy chains of an antibody. The paratope of the antibody binds to its matching epitope on the antigen.

These chains become antigen-specific through the special combination of so-called V and J elements. In higher organisms there are various V and J elements that are linked by VDJ recombination .

literature

• Charles Janeway et al .: Immunobiology . 6th edition ISBN 0-8153-4101-6 . The 5th English edition is available online on the pages of the NCBI Bookshelf (online) .