Antibody multispecificity: A necessary evil

Antibodies represent key effectors of the adaptive immune system. The specificity of antibodies is an established hallmark of the immune response. However, a certain proportion of antibodies exhibit limited promiscuity or multireactivity. Germline antibodies display plasticity which imparts multispecificity to enhance the antibody repertoire. Surprisingly, even affinity matured antibodies display such plasticity and multireactivity enabling their binding to more than one antigen. We propose that antibody multispecificity is a physiological requirement to expand the antibody repertoire at the germline level and to tolerate plasticity in antigens at the mature level. This property of the humoral immune response may attenuate the ability of infectious RNA viruses such as influenza, HIV and SARS-CoV-2 to acquire mutations that render resistance to neutralizing antibodies.