Your immune system’s B cells can produce antibodies against an amazing number of pathogens—viruses, bacteria, etc.—without ever having encountered them. That’s because, as they develop, your B cells reshuffle their antibody-producing genes into an amazing number of possible combinations—more than 100 million—to produce what’s called your primary pre-immune B cell repertoire.

It’s long been thought that in people and in mice this reshuffling process—called V(D)J recombination, after the B cells’ antibody-coding V, D and J gene segments—takes place in two places: the bone marrow and the spleen. But new research from a team led by Frederick Alt, PhD, and Duane Wesemann, MD, PhD, suggests that there may be one more place B cells go to undergo recombination: the gut. What’s more, that reshuffling in the gut may be influenced by the microbes that live there.

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