Related papers: Evolution of Multispecificity in an Immune Network

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…

Population dynamics and evolutionary genetics underly the structure of ecosystems, changing on the same timescale for interacting species with rapid turnover, such as virus (e.g. HIV) and immune response. Thus, an important problem in…

The coming 5G networks have been enabling the creation of a wide variety of new services and applications which demand a new network security architecture. Immunology is the study of the immune system in vertebrates (including humans) which…

Viruses like influenza have long coevolved with host immune systems, gradually shaping the evolutionary trajectory of these pathogens. Host immune systems develop immunity against circulating strains, which in turn avoid extinction by…

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…

In epidemiological modelling, dynamics on networks, and in particular adaptive and heterogeneous networks have recently received much interest. Here we present a detailed analysis of a previously proposed model that combines heterogeneity…

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…

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…

We introduce a class of weighted graphs whose properties are meant to mimic the topological features of idiotypic networks, namely the interaction networks involving the B-core of the immune system. Each node is endowed with a bit-string…

The activation of a specific immune response takes place in the lymphoid organs such as the spleen. We present here a simplified model of the proliferation of specific immune cells in the form of a single delay equation. We show that the…

We consider a simple deterministic model which describes an asymmetric competition between an immune system with a specific and powerful response, and a virus with a broad toxicity and fast mutations. Interest in this model relies on the…

We study an abstract model for the co-evolution between mutating viruses and the adaptive immune system. In sequence space, these two populations are localized around transiently dominant strains. Delocalization or error thresholds exhibit…

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…

When a fraction of a population becomes immune to an infectious disease, the population-wide infection risk decreases nonlinearly due to collective protection, known as herd immunity. Some studies based on mean-field models suggest that…

Herd immunity is shaped not only by the infection capacity of a spreading epidemic or the contact structure of the hosting population, but also by how and under what circumstances individuals acquire immunity. Immunization strategies may…

Multicellular organisms comprise a diverse collection of stable tissues built from different cell types. It remains unclear how large numbers of interacting cells can precisely coordinate their gene expression during tissue…

In response to pathogens, the adaptive immune system generates specific antibodies that bind and neutralize foreign antigens. Understanding the composition of an individual's immune repertoire can provide insights into this process and…

The human immune system has numerous properties that make it ripe for exploitation in the computational domain, such as robustness and fault tolerance, and many different algorithms, collectively termed Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), have…

Many biological networks have to filter out useful information from a vast excess of spurious interactions. We use computational evolution to predict design features of networks processing ligand categorization. The important problem of…

The evolutionary dynamics of human Influenza A virus presents a challenging theoretical problem. An extremely high mutation rate allows the virus to escape, at each epidemic season, the host immune protection elicited by previous…