Protective immunity requires production of high-affinity antibody-producing cells. Me and my team study how high-affinity antibody production is achieved. While cells generally keep somatic mutations at minimum to avoid genome instability and tumorigenesis, immunoglobulin genes during B cell development are actively mutated, e.g. the germinal center B lymphocytes undergo somatic hypermutation (SHM) of immunoglobulin V regions. Failure to correctly target mutation can have severe consequences for genome integrity and is involved in several forms of cancer, particularly leukemia and lymphoma. My focus is to investigate the molecular mechanism of how immunoglobulin enhancers recruit SHM to immunoglobulin genes as well as the mechanism that lead to mis-targeting of mutations to other sites in the genome, including several proto-oncogenes. We use e.g. reporter assays, library screening, genome manipulation and whole genome analysis techniques.