Antibodies​—10,000 per Cell per Second!

The other “half of the unschooled lymphocytes,” The Body Victorious tells us, are B cells that go to the lymph nodes and related tissues for their training to be able to manufacture and launch guided missiles, called antibodies. When the B cells “muster in these tissues, they are like blank pages: they know nothing, and must learn from scratch” to “acquire the capacity to react specifically against substances foreign to the body.” In the lymph nodes, a mature B cell, activated by helper T cells and related antigen, “proliferates and differentiates to form plasma cells that secrete identical antibodies with a single specificity at a rate of about 10,000 molecules per cell per second.”​—Immunology.

Many of them become plasma cells. Again, there must be the right receptors on the helper T cells to join up with the B cells and cause them to produce plasma cells. It is those plasma cells that start churning out thousands of antibodies a second.

Since each plasma cell makes only one kind of antibody, with a receptor specific for only one disease antigen, soon billions are on the front lines homing in on the antigens of one specific disease. They latch onto the invaders, slowing them down, causing them to clump together, making them more tempting morsels for the phagocytes to gobble up. This, together with the release of certain chemicals by the T cells, whips up the macrophages into a feeding frenzy, causing them to gobble up millions of the invading microorganisms.

Moreover, the antibodies themselves can lead to the death of these microorganisms. Once they have locked onto its surface antigens, special protein molecules, called complement factors, flock onto the germ. When the required number of complement factors are in place, they penetrate the membrane of the microorganism, liquid flows in, and the cell bursts and dies.

These antibodies, of course, must also have the right receptors to latch onto the intruders. On this point the 1989 Medical and Health Annual of the Encyclopædia Britannica, page 278, says that B cells are able “to produce between 100 million and a billion different antibodies.”