The authors have developed a method to measure the rate of spontaneous mutations taking place in IgH, the gene encoding the immunoglobulin heavy chain. When an amber chain-termination codon mutates to a sense codon, translation of the polypeptide chain will be completed, and mutant cells producing the heavy chain can be detected with a fluorescent labelled antibody. The protocol used is the compartmentalization test which minimizes any effect of selection. In subclones of the pre-B lymphocyte line 18-81, the spontaneous mutation rate in the part of IgH encoding the variable region is somewhat greater than 10(-5) mutations per base pair per generation. This supports the hypothesis that hypermutation is not dependent on cell stimulation by an antigen. In a hybrid between a cell of this line and a myeloma (which represents the terminal stage of the B-cell lineage), the mutation rate was too low to be determined by this test, less than 10(-9). When the same loss to gain procedure system was used with an opal chain-terminating codon in the part of IgH encoding the constant region (C mu), a high rate of reversion by deletion was found. Long (more than one exon) and short (less than one exon) deletions occurred at rates of 1.7 x 10(-5) and 1.4 x 10(-7) per generation, respectively. It is thought that the high rate of deletion is not related to somatic hypermutation but rather to DNA rearrangement during the heavy-chain class switch, which is occurring in these pre-B cell lines. The point mutation rate was too low to be detected above the background of deletion mutants, less than 5 x 10(-8). The immunoglobulin mutator system works weakly, if at all, on two other, nonimmunoglobulin, genes tested: B2m (beta 2 microglobulin) and the gene for ouabain resistance.