Related papers: Complexity in the Immune System
When the body gets infected by a pathogen or receives a vaccine dose, the immune system develops pathogen-specific immunity. Induced immunity decays in time and years after recovery/vaccination the host might become susceptible again.…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
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…
In order to target threatening pathogens, the adaptive immune system performs a continuous reorganization of its lymphocyte repertoire. Following an immune challenge, the B cell repertoire can evolve cells of increased specificity for the…
Protein evolution underpins life, and understanding its behavior as a system is of great importance. However, our current models of protein evolution are arguably too simplistic to allow quantitative interpretation and prediction of…
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…
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…
The vertebrate adaptive immune system provides a flexible and diverse set of molecules to neutralize pathogens. Yet, viruses such as HIV can cause chronic infections by evolving as quickly as the adaptive immune system, forming an…
Immunological systems have been an abundant inspiration to contemporary computer scientists. Problem solving strategies, stemming from known immune system phenomena, have been successfully applied to challenging problems of modern computing…
The containment of epidemic spreading is a major challenge in science. Vaccination, whenever available, is the best way to prevent the spreading, because it eventually immunizes individuals. However, vaccines are not perfect, and total…
The evolution of the adaptive immune system is characterized by changes in the relative abundances of the B- and T-cell clones that make up its repertoires. To fully capture this evolution, we need to describe the complex dynamics of the…
Divergence in antigen response of the immune network is discussed, based on shape-space modelling. The present model extends the shape-space model by introducing the evolution of specificity of idiotypes. When the amount of external antigen…
For over a century, immunology has masterfully discovered and dissected the components of our immune system, yet its collective behavior remains fundamentally unpredictable. In this perspective, we argue that building on the learnings of…
Biological systems are modular, and this modularity affects the evolution of biological systems over time and in different environments. We here develop a theory for the dynamics of evolution in a rugged, modular fitness landscape. We show…
Viruses display striking diversity in structure, transmission mode, immune interaction, and evolutionary behavior. Despite this diversity, viral strategies are not unconstrained. Here we present a unifying framework that treats viral…
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…
Complex systems with tightly coadapted parts frequently appear in living systems and are difficult to account for through Darwinian evolution, that is random variation and natural selection, if the constituent parts are independently coded…
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…
Pathogens drive changes in host immune systems that in turn exert pressure for pathogens to evolve. Quantifying and understanding this constant coevolutionary process has clear practical global health implications. Yet its relatively easier…
The long-time dynamics of somatic adaptability in immune system is simulated by a simple physical model. The immune system described by the model exhibits a scale free behavior as is observed in living systems. The balance between the…