Related papers: Complexity in the Immune System
One important feature of the mammalian immune system is the highly specific binding of antigens to antibodies. Antibodies generated in response to one infection may also provide some level of cross immunity to other infections. One model to…
Biological systems reach hierarchical complexity that has no counterpart outside the realm of biology. Undoubtedly, biological entities obey the fundamental physical laws. Can today's physics provide an explanatory framework for…
Almost every biological, economic and social system is a complex adaptive system (CAS). Mathematical and computer models are relevant to CAS. Some approaches to modeling CAS are given. Applications in vaccination and the immune system are…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Opposition to vaccination has long been a non-negligible public health phenomenon resulted from people's varied perceptions toward vaccination (e.g., vaccine-phobia). This paper investigates the voluntary vaccination behavior of a…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
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,…
The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…
Advances in healthcare and in the quality of life significantly increase human life expectancy. With the ageing of populations, new un-faced challenges are brought to science. The human body is naturally selected to be well-functioning…
We investigate how a population's natural and vaccine immunity affects the competitive balance between two strains of an infectious disease with different epidemiological characteristics. Specifically, we consider the case where one strain…
Is calendar time the true clock of innovation? By combining complexity science with innovation economics and using vaccine datasets containing over three million citations and eight regulatory authorisations, we discover that calendar time…
Aging is a fundamental aspect of living systems that undergo a progressive deterioration of physiological function with age and an increase of vulnerability to disease and death. Living systems, known as complex systems, require complexity…
Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, inter-genic and other non-genic sequences that appear to have no vital functional role or phenotype manifestation. Their existence, a long-standing puzzle, is viewed from the principle of…
Innate immunity now occupies a central role in immunology. However, artificial immune system models have largely been inspired by adaptive not innate immunity. This paper reviews the biological principles and properties of innate immunity…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
The adaptive immune system engages in an arms race with evolving viruses, trying to generate new responses to viral strains that continually move away from the set of variants that have already elicited a functional immune response. In…
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…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
Biological systems have evolved to amazingly complex states, yet we do not understand in general how evolution operates to generate increasing genetic and functional complexity. Molecular recognition sites are short genome segments or…
Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health problem. To gain a fundamental understanding of resistance evolution, a combination of systematic experimental and theoretical approaches is required. Evolution experiments combined with…