Related papers: Complexity in the Immune System
Serology testing can identify past infection by quantifying the immune response of an infected individual providing important public health guidance. Individual immune responses are time-dependent, which is reflected in antibody…
The spreading of infectious diseases with and without immunization of individuals can be modeled by stochastic processes that exhibit a transition between an active phase of epidemic spreading and an absorbing phase, where the disease dies…
Many pathogens spread primarily via direct contact between infected and susceptible hosts. Thus, the patterns of contacts or contact network of a population fundamentally shapes the course of epidemics. While there is a robust and growing…
System dynamics and agent based simulation models can both be used to model and understand interactions of entities within a population. Our modeling work presented here is concerned with understanding the suitability of the different types…
Inspired by Minority Games, we constructed a novel individual-level game of adaptive decision-making based on the dilemma of deciding whether to participate in voluntary influenza vaccination programs. The proportion of the population…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
The repertoire of lymphocyte receptors in the adaptive immune system protects organisms from diverse pathogens. A well-adapted repertoire should be tuned to the pathogenic environment to reduce the cost of infections. We develop a general…
Complex macroscopic behaviour can arise in many-body systems with only very simple elements as a consequence of the combination of competition and inhomogeneity. This paper attempts to illustrate how statistical physics has driven this…
We consider the interplay of vaccination and migration rates on disease persistence in epidemiological systems. We show that short-term and long-term migration can inhibit disease persistence. As a result, we show how migration changes how…
Modeling the immune system so that its essential functionalities stand out without the need for every molecular or cellular interaction to be taken into account has been challenging for many decades. Two competing approaches have been the…
The abundance of different species in a community often follows the log series distribution. Other ecological patterns also have simple forms. Why does the complexity and variability of ecological systems reduce to such simplicity? Common…
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
Affinity maturation produces antibodies that bind antigens with high specificity by accumulating mutations in the antibody sequence. Mapping out the antibody-antigen affinity landscape can give us insight into the accessible paths during…
A measure called Physical Complexity is established and calculated for a population of sequences, based on statistical physics, automata theory, and information theory. It is a measure of the quantity of information in an organism's genome.…
The antibody repertoire of each individual is continuously updated by the evolutionary process of B cell receptor mutation and selection. It has recently become possible to gain detailed information concerning this process through…
Revisiting the thirty years-old notions of resource-bounded immunity and simplicity, we investigate the structural characteristics of various immunity notions: strong immunity, almost immunity, and hyperimmunity as well as their…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
SIR models, also with age structure, can be used to describe the evolution of an infective disease. A vaccination campaign influences this dynamics immunizing part of the susceptible individuals, essentially turning them into recovered…
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…
Among features of real immune responses which occur when antigens invade a body,there are two remarkable features. One is that the amount of antibodies produced in the secondary invasion by the same antigens is more than 10 times larger…