One ancient fold, many jobs: how the immunoglobulin domain evolved into antibodies, MHC and titin
arjunrajlab · x · 2026-10-16
Biologist Slavov highlights a striking example of biological design reuse: antibodies, T-cell receptors, MHC molecules, cell adhesion proteins, and even the giant muscle protein titin all share one ancient structural building block — a small β-sandwich domain called the immunoglobulin fold.
The fold predates adaptive immune systems by hundreds of millions of years; repeated duplications then drifted into wildly different roles, from a shape-shifting recognition system in antibodies to the machinery that displays intracellular state to the immune system. The author invites other examples of one biological design reused across systems.
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