Related papers: How a well-adapted immune system is organized
Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity. Molecular recognition sites are short genome segments or…
A central question in human immunology is how a patient's repertoire of T cells impacts disease. Here, we introduce a method to infer the causal effects of T cell receptor (TCR) sequences on patient outcomes using observational TCR…
When confronted with an undesired cell population, such as bacterial infections or tumors, we seek the most effective treatment, designed to eliminate the population as rapidly as possible. A common practice is to monitor the cells…
The design of an efficient curing policy, able to stem an epidemic process at an affordable cost, has to account for the structure of the population contact network supporting the contagious process. Thus, we tackle the problem of…
By developing communications and increase of access points, computer networks have been vulnerable considerably against wide range of information attacks, specially new and complicated attacks. Every day, replication attacks attack millions…
The brain is characterized by a strong heterogeneity of inhibitory neurons. We report that spiking neural networks display a resonance to the heterogeneity of inhibitory neurons, with optimal input/output responsiveness occurring for levels…
We present a general framework for adaptive allocation of viral tests in social contact networks. We pose and solve several complementary problems. First, we consider the design of a social sensing system whose objective is the early…
A key scientific challenge during the outbreak of novel infectious diseases is to predict how the course of the epidemic changes under different countermeasures that limit interaction in the population. Most epidemiological models do not…
An important feature of many complex systems, both natural and artificial, is the structure and organization of their interaction networks with interesting properties. Here we present a theory of self-organization by evolutionary adaptation…
Most biological rates and times decrease systematically with organism body size. We use an ordinary differential equation (ODE) model of West Nile Virus in birds to show that pathogen replication rates decline with host body size, but…
Some cells have to take decision based on the quality of surroundings ligands, almost irrespective of their quantity, a problem we name "absolute discrimination". An example of absolute discrimination is recognition of not-self by immune T…
Consider a consensus-driven multi-agent dynamic system. The interaction range, which defines the set of neighbors for each agent, plays a key role in influencing connectivity of the underlying network. In this paper, we assume the system is…
We investigate the dynamics of a simple epidemiological model for the invasion by a pathogen strain of a population where another strain circulates. We assume that reinfection by the same strain is possible but occurs at a reduced rate due…
An epidemic spreading in a network calls for a decision on the part of the network members: They should decide whether to protect themselves or not. Their decision depends on the trade-off between their perceived risk of being infected and…
Adaptive networks are well-suited to perform decentralized information processing and optimization tasks and to model various types of self-organized and complex behavior encountered in nature. Adaptive networks consist of a collection of…
Cytotoxic T lymphocytes eliminate infected or malignant cells, safeguarding surrounding tissues. Although experimental and systems-immunology studies have cataloged many molecular and cellular actors involved in an immune response, the…
One of the famous results of network science states that networks with heterogeneous connectivity are more susceptible to epidemic spreading than their more homogeneous counterparts. In particular, in networks of identical nodes it has been…
In complex environments, there are costs to both ignorance and perception. An organism needs to track fitness-relevant information about its world, but the more information it tracks, the more resources it must devote to memory and…
The microbiome constitutes a complex microbial ecology of interacting components that regulates important pathways in the host. Measurements of microbial abundances are key to learning the intricate network of interactions amongst microbes.…
Our work stems from the consideration that the spreading of a disease is modulated by the individual's perception of the infected neighborhood and his/her strategy to avoid being infected as well. We introduced a general ``cellular agent''…