Related papers: Assessing T cell clonal size distribution: a non-p…
The adaptive immune system responds to pathogens by selecting clones of cells with specific receptors. While clonal selection in response to particular antigens has been studied in detail, it is unknown how a lifetime of exposures to many…
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…
An essential feature of the adaptive immune system is the proliferation of antigen-specific lymphocytes during an immune reaction to form a large pool of effector cells. This proliferation must be regulated to ensure an effective response…
The adaptive immune system of vertebrates can detect, respond to, and memorize diverse pathogens from past experience. While the clonal selection of T helper (Th) cells is the simple and established mechanism to better recognize new…
The human adaptive immune response is known to weaken in advanced age, resulting in increased severity of pathogen-born illness, poor vaccine efficacy, and a higher prevalence of cancer in the elderly. Age-related erosion of the T-cell…
The evolution of the adaptive immune system is characterized by changes in the relative abundances of the B- and T-cell clones that make up its repertoires. To fully capture this evolution, we need to describe the complex dynamics of the…
We study the Langevin dynamics of the adaptive immune system, modelled by a lymphocyte network in which the B cells are interacting with the T cells and antigen. We assume that B clones and T clones are evolving in different thermal noise…
Naive human T cells are produced in the thymus, which atrophies abruptly and severely in response to physical or psychological stress. To understand how an instance of stress affects the size and "diversity" of the peripheral naive T cell…
In most of the recent immunological literature the differences across antigen receptor populations are examined via non-parametric statistical measures of species overlap and diversity borrowed from ecological studies. While this approach…
The clonal expansion of T cells during an infection is tightly regulated to ensure an appropriate immune response against invading pathogens. Although experiments have mapped the trajectory from expansion to contraction, the interplay…
The self-organization of cells into complex tissues relies on a tight coordination of cell behavior. Identifying the cellular processes driving tissue growth is key to understanding the emergence of tissue forms and devising targeted…
Immune repertoires rely on diversity of T-cell and B-cell receptors to protect us against foreign threats. The ability to recognize a wide variety of pathogens is linked to the number of different clonotypes expressed by an individual. Out…
T cells are central to the adaptive immune response, capable of detecting pathogenic antigens while ignoring healthy tissues with remarkable specificity and sensitivity. Quantitatively understanding how T cell receptors (TCRs) discriminate…
Our main tenet argues that the primary role of positive thymic selection and the resulting T cell population is the maintenance of a homeostatic equilibrium with self MHC-self peptide complexes. The homeostatic T cell repertoire can…
The adaptive immune response relies on T cells that combine phenotypic specialization with diversity of T cell receptors (TCRs) to recognize a wide range of pathogens. TCRs are acquired and selected during T cell maturation in the thymus.…
Studies of T cells and their clonally unique receptors have shown promise in elucidating the association between immune response and human disease. Methods to identify T-cell receptor clones which expand or contract in response to certain…
Biological tools such as genetic lineage tracing, three dimensional confocal microscopy and next generation DNA sequencing are providing new ways to quantify the distribution of clones of normal and mutated cells. Population-wide clone size…
The set of T cells that express the same T cell receptor (TCR) sequence represents a T cell clone. The number of different naive T cell clones in an organism reflects the number of different T cell receptors (TCRs) arising from…
Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…
The T cell arm of the adaptive immune system provides the host protection against unknown pathogens by discriminating between host and foreign material. This discriminatory capability is achieved by the creation of a repertoire of cells…