How Many Antibodies and Antigens Exist

While it is clearly impossible to enumerate the potential antigens to be found in the environment, one may estimate that number based on 

Quattrochi et al. (1969) examined the tryptic peptides from the light chain of 100 different mouse myeloma proteins. They looked for identity of patterns by two-dimensional peptide mapping but were unable to find two that were identical. They concluded that at least 1000 different L chains must exist to account for their results. This is a minimum estimate since it is not known whether the distribution of myeloma light chains is representative of the distribution of light chains in nonneoplastic cells. It is possible that inducing chemical irritant (and also possibly the virus which may be involved in myeloma induction) may have some selective influence on the class and subgroups found, and they may not provide a 

Recently, considerable effort has been made to study the arrangement of immunoglobulin genes. Two questions in particular have received attention  

How many genes corresponding to the constant and to the variable regions are represented in mouse myeloma cells  

DNA sequence of 1250 bases between the V and C regions may also force reinterpretation of previous data (Brack and Tonegawa, 1977). 

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