Related papers: Affinity maturation for an optimal balance between…
One of the key phenomena in the adaptive immune response to infection and immunization is affinity maturation, during which antibody genes are mutated and selected, typically resulting in a substantial increase in binding affinity to the…
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,…
Within the germinal center in follicles, B-cells proliferate, mutate and differentiate, while being submitted to a powerful selection~: a micro-evolutionary mechanism at the heart of adaptive immunity. A new foreign pathogen is confronted…
We introduce a novel, multi-scale model for affinity maturation, which aims to capture the intra-clonal, inter-clonal and epitope-specific organization of the B cell population in a germinal center. We describe the evolution of the B cell…
The adaptive immune system relies on diversity of its repertoire of receptors to protect the organism from a great variety of pathogens. Since the initial repertoire is the result of random gene rearrangement, binding of receptors is not…
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-cells or non-self cells. It does this with the help…
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…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
Immune cells learn about their antigenic targets using tactile sense: during recognition, a highly organized yet dynamic motif, named immunological synapse, forms between immune cells and antigen-presenting cells (APCs). Via synapses,…
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…
Our adaptive immune system relies on the persistence over long times of a diverse set of antigen-experienced B cells to encode our memories of past infections and to protect us against future ones. While longitudinal repertoire sequencing…
When our immune system encounters foreign antigens (i.e., from pathogens), the B cells that produce our antibodies undergo a cyclic process of proliferation, mutation, and selection, improving their ability to bind to the specific antigen.…
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-cells or non-self cells. It does this with the help…
The clonal selection principle explains the basic features of an adaptive immune response to a antigenic stimulus. It established the idea that only those cells that recognize the antigens are selected to proliferate and differentiate. This…
Somatic hypermutations of immunoglobulin (Ig) genes occuring during affinity maturation drive B-cell receptors' ability to evolve strong binding to their antigenic targets. The landscape of these mutations is highly heterogeneous, with…
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…
We present a model that considers the maturation of the antibody population following primary antigen presentation as a global optimization problem. The trade-off that emerges from our model describes the balance between the safety of…
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 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…
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…