The vertebrate immune system is a wonder of modern evolution. Occasionally, however, correlations within the immune system lead to inappropriate recruitment of preexisting T cells against novel viral diseases. We present a random energy theory for the correlations in the naive and memory T cell immune responses. The non-linear susceptibility of the random energy model to structural changes captures the correlations in the immune response to mutated antigens. We show how the sequence-level diversity of the T cell repertoire drives the dynamics of the immune response against mutated viral antigens.
@article{arxiv.q-bio/0404023,
title = {Correlations in the T Cell Response to Altered Peptide Ligands},
author = {Jeong-Man Park and Michael W. Deem},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:q-bio/0404023},
year = {2009}
}