Related papers: Evolution of Multispecificity in an Immune Network
The immune system protects the body against health-threatening entities, known as antigens, through very complex interactions involving the antigens and the system's own entities. One remarkable feature resulting from such interactions is…
We present a model for the evolution of networks of occupied sites on undirected regular graphs. At every iteration step in a parallel update I randomly chosen empty sites are occupied and occupied sites having degree outside of a given…
We numerically study a dynamical system model of an idiotypic immune network with a small number of degrees of freedom. The model was originally introduced by Varela et.al., and describes antibodies interacting in a body in order to prepare…
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…
We study a dynamical system model of an idiotypic immune network with a small number of degrees of freedom, mainly focusing on the effect of a threshold above which antibodies can recognise antibodies. The response of the system to…
Understanding and modelling the complexity of the immune system is a challenge that is shared by the ImmunoComplexiT$^1$ thematic network from the RNSC. The immune system is a complex biological, adaptive, highly diversified, self-organized…
We consider a minimalistic dynamic model of the idiotypic network of B-lymphocytes. A network node represents a population of B-lymphocytes of the same specificity (idiotype), which is encoded by a bitstring. The links of the network…
In this paper, after a telegraphic introduction to modern immunology, we present a simple model for the idiotypic network among antibodies and we study its relevance for the maintenance of immunological memory. We also consider the problem…
We consider self-tolerance and its failure -autoimmunity- in a minimal mathematical model of the idiotypic network. A node in the network represents a clone of B-lymphocytes and its antibodies of the same idiotype which is encoded by a…
The immune system normally protects the human host against death by infection. However, when an immune response is mistakenly directed at self antigens, autoimmune disease can occur. We describe a model of protein evolution to simulate the…
In spite of their many facets, the phenomena of autoimmunity and immunodeficiency seem to be related to each other through the subtle links connecting retroviral mutation and action to immune response and adaptation. In a previous work, we…
Viruses evolve in the background of host immune systems that exert selective pressure and drive viral evolutionary trajectories. This interaction leads to different evolutionary patterns in antigenic space. Examples observed in nature…
We introduce and analyze a within-host dynamical model of the coevolution between rapidly mutating pathogens and the adaptive immune response. Pathogen mutation and a homeostatic constraint on lymphocytes both play a role in allowing the…
We model the immune surveillance of a pathogen which passes through $n$ immunologically distinct stages. The biological parameters of this system induce a partial order on the stages, and this, in turn, determines which stages will be…
We argue that immune system is an adaptive complex system. It is shown that it has emergent properties. Its network structure is of the small world network type. The network is of the threshold type, which helps in avoiding autoimmunity. It…
This contribution is devoted to a new model of HIV multiplication motivated by the patent of one of the authors. We take into account the antigenic diversity through what we define "antigenicity", whether of the virus or of the adapted…
Biological organisms have evolved a wide range of immune mechanisms to defend themselves against pathogens. Beyond molecular details, these mechanisms differ in how protection is acquired, processed and passed on to subsequent generations…
We investigate a model where idiotypes (characterizing B-lymphocytes and antibodies of an immune system) and anti-idiotypes are represented by complementary bitstrings of a given length d allowing for a number of mismatches (matching…
As pathogens spread in a population of hosts, immunity is built up and the pool of susceptible individuals is depleted. This generates selective pressure, to which many human RNA viruses, such as influenza virus or SARS-CoV-2, respond with…
How does immune system evolve functional proteins - potent antibodies - in such a short time? We address this question using a microscopic, protein-level, sequence-based model of humoral immune response with explicitly defined interactions…