Related papers: Immune Network: An Example of Complex Adaptive Sys…

We expose first a biological model of memory based on one hand of the mechanical oscillations of axons during action potential and on the other hand on the changes in the extra cellular matrix composition when a mechanical strain is applied…

The immune system is a complex biological system with a highly distributed, adaptive and self-organising nature. This paper presents an artificial immune system (AIS) that exploits some of these characteristics and is applied to the task of…

Immune cells coordinate their efforts for the correct and efficient functioning of the immune system (IS). Each cell type plays a distinct role and communicates with other cell types through mediators such as cytokines, chemokines and…

Recent experimental evidence suggests that acute myeloid leukemias may originate from multiple clones of malignant cells. Nevertheless it is not known how the observed clones may differ with respect to cell properties such as proliferation…

Many biological, social and man-made systems are better described in terms of temporal networks, i.e. networks whose links are only present at certain points in time, rather than by static ones. In particular, it has been found that…

The ability of the adaptive immune system to discriminate between self and non-self mainly stems from the ontogenic clonal-deletion of lymphocytes expressing strong binding affinity with self-peptides. However, some self-directed…

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…

Complex networks describe a wide range of systems in nature and society. Frequently cited examples include Internet, WWW, a network of chemicals linked by chemical reactions, social relationship networks, citation networks, etc. The…

Networks effectively capture interactions among components of complex systems, and have thus become a mainstay in many scientific disciplines. Growing evidence, especially from biology, suggest that networks undergo changes over time, and…

Networks provide a skeleton for the spread of contagions, like, information, ideas, behaviors and diseases. Many times networks over which contagions diffuse are unobserved and need to be inferred. Here we apply survival theory to develop…

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…

We study a mechanism of activity sustaining on networks inspired by a well-known model of neuronal dynamics. Our primary focus is the emergence of self-sustaining collective activity patterns, where no single node can stay active by itself,…

The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with Choice and Refusal (IPD/CR) is an extension of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with evolution that allows players to choose and to refuse their game partners. From individual behaviors, behavioral…

Across the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to contend with suboptimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. The resulting seed banks are complex,…

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…

High-throughput sequencing of B- and T-cell receptors makes it possible to track immune repertoires across time, in different tissues, and in acute and chronic diseases or in healthy individuals. However, quantitative comparison between…

Community structure is one of the most relevant features encountered in numerous real-world applications of networked systems. Despite the tremendous effort of scientists working on this subject over the past few decades to characterize,…

For real-world complex system constantly enduring perturbation, to achieve survival goal in changing yet unknown environments, the central problem is constantly adapting themself to external environments according to environmental feedback.…

The major biochemical networks of the living cell, the network of interacting genes and the network of biochemical reactions, are highly interdependent, however, they have been studied mostly as separate systems so far. In the last years an…

Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…