Related papers: Diversity against adversity: How adaptive immunity…
An interesting inference drawn by some Covid-19 epidemiological models is that there exists a proportion of the population who are not susceptible to infection -- even at the start of the current pandemic. This paper introduces a model of…
The population dynamics theory of B cells in a typical germinal center could play an important role in revealing how affinity maturation is achieved. However, the existing models encountered some conflicts with experiments. To resolve these…
The immune system is a real-time example of an evolving system that navigates the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. How this system responds to disease and vaccination is discussed. Of particular focus is the case…
Viral infections trigger complex immune responses with heterogeneous outcomes shaped by nonlinear feedbacks. An ordinary differential equation model is developed to investigate immune response dynamics during viral infection, incorporating…
The immune system protects the body against health-threatening entities, known as antigens, through very complex interactions involving the antigens and the system's own entities. One remarkable feature resulting from such interactions is…
The adaptive immune system relies on the diversity of receptors expressed on the surface of B and T-cells to protect the organism from a vast amount of pathogenic threats. The proliferation and degradation dynamics of different cell types…
Affinity maturation of antibodies during immune responses is achieved by multiple rounds of somatic hypermutation and subsequent preferential selection of those B cells that express B cell receptors with improved binding characteristics for…
We study the maturation of the antibody population following primary antigen presentation as a global optimization problem. Emphasis is placed on the trade-off between the safety of mutations that lead to local improvements to the…
The adaptive immune system constantly remodels its lymphocyte repertoire for better protection against future pathogens. Its ability to improve antigen recognition on the fly relies on somatic mutation and selective expansion of B…
Among features of real immune responses which occur when antigens invade a body,there are two remarkable features. One is that the amount of antibodies produced in the secondary invasion by the same antigens is more than 10 times larger…
The long-time dynamics of somatic adaptability in immune system is simulated by a simple physical model. The immune system described by the model exhibits a scale free behavior as is observed in living systems. The balance between the…
Recognition of pathogens relies on families of proteins showing great diversity. Here we construct maximum entropy models of the sequence repertoire, building on recent experiments that provide a nearly exhaustive sampling of the IgM…
We study the emergence of the collective spatio-temporal macroscopic properties of the immune system, by representing individually the elementary interactions between its microscopic components (antibodies, antigens, cytokines). The results…
Biological systems are modular, and this modularity affects the evolution of biological systems over time and in different environments. We here develop a theory for the dynamics of evolution in a rugged, modular fitness landscape. We show…
The immune system recognizes a myriad of invading pathogens and their toxic products. It does so with a finite repertoire of antibodies and T cell receptors. We here describe theories that quantify the immune system dynamics. We describe…
The adaptive and innate branches of the vertebrate immune system work in close collaboration to protect organisms from harmful pathogens. As an organism ages its immune system undergoes immunosenescence, characterized by declined…
A persistent public health challenge is finding immunization schemes that are effective in combating highly mutable pathogens such as HIV and influenza viruses. To address this, we analyze a simplified model of affinity maturation, the…
The immune response to a pathogen has two basic features. The first is the expansion of a few pathogen-specific cells to form a population large enough to control the pathogen. The second is the process of differentiation of cells from an…
The adaptive immune system is a natural diagnostic and therapeutic. It recognizes threats earlier than clinical symptoms manifest and neutralizes antigen with exquisite specificity. Recognition specificity and broad reactivity is enabled…
Understanding the dynamics of antibody levels is crucial for characterizing the time-dependent response to immune events: either infections or vaccinations. The sequence and timing of these events significantly influence antibody level…