Related papers: How a well-adapted immune system is organized
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…
We consider a spatial stochastic model for a pathogen population growing inside a host that attempts to eliminate the pathogens through its immune system. The pathogen population is divided into different types. A pathogen can either…
Optimal control of interdependent epidemics spreading over complex networks is a critical issue. We first establish a framework to capture the coupling between two epidemics, and then analyze the system's equilibrium states by categorizing…
The similarity between neural and immune networks has been known for decades, but so far we did not understand the mechanism that allows the immune system, unlike associative neural networks, to recall and execute a large number of…
Many components of the IS are constructed as modular units which do not need to communicate with each other such that the number of components increases but the size remains constant. However, a sub-modular IS architecture in which lymph…
Therapeutic strategies to correct an excessive immune response to pathogenic infection is investigated as an optimal control problem. The control problem is formulated around a four dimensional mathematical model describing the inflammatory…
Cells often have tens of thousands of receptors, even though only a few activated receptors can trigger full cellular responses. Reasons for the overabundance of receptors remain unclear. We suggest that, in certain conditions, the large…
We analyze an optimal control version of a simple SIRS epidemiology model. The policy maker can adopt policies to diminish the contact rate between infected and susceptible individuals, at a specific economic cost. The arrival of a vaccine…
Serology testing can identify past infection by quantifying the immune response of an infected individual providing important public health guidance. Individual immune responses are time-dependent, which is reflected in antibody…
During chronic infection, HIV-1 engages in a rapid coevolutionary arms race with the host's adaptive immune system. While it is clear that HIV exerts strong selection on the adaptive immune system, the characteristics of the somatic…
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…
For many infectious diseases, a small-world network on an underlying regular lattice is a suitable simplified model for the contact structure of the host population. It is well known that the contact network, described in this setting by a…
The ability of the adaptive immune system to respond to arbitrary pathogens stems from the broad diversity of immune cell surface receptors (TCRs). This diversity originates in a stochastic DNA editing process (VDJ recombination) that acts…
B cell receptors (BCRs) play a crucial role in recognizing and fighting foreign antigens. High-throughput sequencing enables in-depth sampling of the BCRs repertoire after immunization. However, only a minor fraction of BCRs actively…
T lymphocytes (T cells) orchestrate adaptive immune responses upon activation. T cell activation requires sufficiently strong binding of T cell receptors (TCRs) on their surface to short peptides (p) derived from foreign proteins, which are…
Risk-driven behavior provides a feedback mechanism through which individuals both shape and are collectively affected by an epidemic. We introduce a general and flexible compartmental model to study the effect of heterogeneity in the…
The spread of infectious disease and the evolution of antigenically distinct strains are often modeled separately, despite strong feedbacks mediated by host immune memory and heterogeneous contacts. To tackle this challenging problem, we…
In this letter we study the full semi-conservative treatment of a model for the co-evolution of a virus and an adaptive immune system. Regions of viability are calculated for both conservatively and semi-conservatively replicating viruses…
Infectious pathogens often propagate by superspreading, which focusses onward transmission on disproportionately few infected individuals. At the same time, infector-infectee pairs tend to have more similar transmission potentials than…
With the advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies, the fields of immunogenomics and adaptive immune receptor repertoire research are facing both opportunities and challenges. Adaptive immune receptor repertoire sequencing…