IgD has remained a mysterious Ig class and a bane to immunology students since its discovery >40 years ago. Its spotty occurrence in mammals and birds and the discovery of an isotype with similarities to IgD in bony fish are perplexing. We have identified IgD heavy (H) chain (␦) from the amphibian Xenopus tropicalis during examination of the IgH locus. The Xenopus ␦ gene is in the same position, immediately 3 of the IgM gene, as in mammals, and it is expressed only in the spleen at low levels, primarily as a transmembrane receptor by surface IgM ؉ cells. Our data suggest that frog IgD is expressed on mature B cells, like in mouse͞human. Unexpectedly, Xenopus IgD is orthologous to IgW, an Ig isotype found only in cartilaginous fish and lungfish, demonstrating that IgD͞W, like IgM, was present in the ancestor of all living jawed vertebrates. In striking contrast to IgM, IgD͞W is evolutionarily labile, showing many duplications͞deletions of domains, the presence of multiple splice forms, existence as predominantly a secretory or transmembrane form, or loss of the entire gene in a species-specific manner. Our study suggests that IgD͞W has played varied roles in different vertebrate taxa since the inception of the adaptive immune system, and it may have been preserved as a flexible locus over evolutionary time to complement steadfast IgM.evolution ͉ immune system S ince the pioneering work of comparative immunologists in the 1960s, IgM has been the Ig isotype believed to be primordial and most stable in vertebrate evolution (1). Despite differences in the degree of polymerization of the secretory form in different vertebrate groups (1, 2) and a major splice variant of the transmembrane (TM) form in teleost fish (3), IgM is renowned for its molecular, biochemical, and functional stability. Present in all living jawed vertebrates, IgM is the first isotype to be expressed both in ontogeny and during humoral adaptive immune responses and is found as the major TM receptor on the surface of both conventional and ''innate'' B cells (4).By contrast, IgD has remained an enigmatic isotype since its discovery long ago (5). Like IgM, IgD is expressed as a TM receptor on B cells of mouse and human, generated as a result of alternative splicing of pre-mRNA containing the transcribed variable (V) region and the IgM and IgD heavy (H) chain constant (C) regions ( and ␦, respectively). Because of its spotty presence in mammals and absence in birds, IgD was assumed to be a recently evolved isotype (6). However, the discovery of an isotype in ray-finned bony fish with sequence similarity to IgD (7) and its presence in some mammals previously believed to lack IgD (8) have greatly modified our view of Ig isotype evolution and suggested it may have arisen much earlier.A similarly strange phylogenetic jump surrounds the isotype IgW, which was discovered first in skates (9, 10) and later in sharks (11,12). The secreted version of the IgW H chain ( ) is present in long and short forms in all elasmobranchs tested to date, and the TM form is al...