Related papers: Anergy in self-directed B lymphocytes from a stati…
According to Jerne's idiotypic network hypothesis, the adaptive immune system is regulated by interactions between the variable regions of antibodies, B cells, and T cells.1 The symmetrical immune network theory2,3 is based on Jerne's…
Two important problems affect the ability of asexual populations to accumulate beneficial mutations, and hence to adapt. First, clonal interference causes some beneficial mutations to be outcompeted by more-fit mutations which occur in the…
High-throughput sequencing of B- and T-cell receptors makes it possible to track immune repertoires across time, in different tissues, and in acute and chronic diseases or in healthy individuals. However, quantitative comparison between…
A stochastic model for the activation of T-cells is analysed. T-cells are part of the immune system and recognize foreign antigens against a background of the body's own molecules. The model under consideration is a slight generalization of…
In this work we use belief-propagation techniques to study the equilibrium behaviour of a minimal model for the immune system comprising interacting T and B clones. We investigate the effect of the so-called idiotypic interactions among…
In order to target threatening pathogens, the adaptive immune system performs a continuous reorganization of its lymphocyte repertoire. Following an immune challenge, the B cell repertoire can evolve cells of increased specificity for the…
Hematopoietic stem cells in mammals are known to reside mostly in the bone marrow, but also transitively passage in small numbers in the blood. Experimental findings have suggested that they exist in a dynamic equilibrium, continuously…
Self-renewal is a constitutive property of stem cells. Testing the cancer stem cell hypothesis requires investigation of the impact of self-renewal on cancer expansion. To understand better this impact, we propose a mathematical model…
Understanding causal heterogeneity is essential for scientific discovery in domains such as biology and medicine. However, existing methods lack causal awareness, with insufficient modeling of heterogeneity, confounding, and observational…
Linear response theory, the backbone of non-equilibrium statistical physics, has recently been extended to explain how and why non-ergodic renewal processes are insensitive to simple perturbations, such as in habituation. It was established…
Neurons in the brain are often finely tuned for specific task variables. Moreover, such disentangled representations are highly sought after in machine learning. Here we mathematically prove that simple biological constraints on neurons,…
The immune system provides a rich metaphor for computer security: anomaly detection that works in nature should work for machines. However, early artificial immune system approaches for computer security had only limited success. Arguably,…
The ability of a cancer cell population to achieve heterogeneity in their phenotype distributions offers advantages in tumor invasiveness and drug resistance. Studying the mechanisms behind such observed heterogeneity in mammalian cells…
Left-right axis specification establishes embryonic laterality through asymmetric signaling cascades originating at the cellular scale. We previously reported the presence of a directionality bias in confined pairs of endothelial (and…
Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease occurs due to plaque accumulation in the inner artery wall. In atherosclerotic plaque formation monocytes and macrophages play a significant role in controlling the disease dynamics. In the…
A major contribution to the onset and development of autoimmune disease is known to come from infections. An important practical problem is identifying the precise mechanism by which the breakdown of immune tolerance as a result of immune…
Programmed cell death - apoptosis is one of the most studied biological phenomenon of recent years. Apoptotic regulatory network contains several significant control points, including probably the most important one - Bcl--2 apoptotic…
Microbiological systems evolve to fulfill their tasks with maximal efficiency. The immune system is a remarkable example, where self-non self distinction is accomplished by means of molecular interaction between self proteins and antigens,…
The biological immune system is a robust, complex, adaptive system that defends the body from foreign pathogens. It is able to categorize all cells (or molecules) within the body as self or non-self substances. It does this with the help of…
Cells are able to generate phenotypic diversity both during development and in response to stressful and changing environments, aiding survival. The biologically and medically vital process of a cell assuming a functionally important fate…