Robert J. Petrella- 1Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States
- 2Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
A Correction on
Antibodies and cryptographic hash functions: quantifying the specificity paradox
By Petrella RJ (2025) Front. Immunol. 16:1585421. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1585421
In the Introduction, the first sentence under point #5 contains a single instance of the word “antigens”, which should be replaced with “antibodies”. A correction has been made to the section Introduction, paragraph 5 as follows:
“5. The specificity of individual epitopes for their cognate antibodies is quite high: in the range of 1−10−14 to 1−10−8, but epitope space is so large that it virtually guarantees, statistically, that two randomly chosen antibodies in an immune repertoire will share many common epitopes in their binding spaces–conservatively, ≈ 106 to 1016 protein or peptide epitopes, on average (Results Section 3.5), although this is a very small fraction of the total size of the relevant epitope space.”
The original version of this article has been updated.
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Keywords: antibodies, adaptive immune system, receptors, antigens, epitopes, degeneracy, polyspecificity, polyreactivity
Citation: Petrella RJ (2026) Correction: Antibodies and cryptographic hash functions: quantifying the specificity paradox. Front. Immunol. 16:1756946. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2025.1756946
Received: 29 November 2025; Accepted: 16 December 2025; Revised: 29 November 2025;
Published: 05 January 2026.
Edited and reviewed by:
Simon Mitchell, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, United KingdomCopyright © 2026 Petrella. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Robert J. Petrella, cGV0cmVsbGFAZmFzLmhhcnZhcmQuZWR1; cm9iZXJ0anBldHJlbGxhQHlhaG9vLmNvbQ==