Antibodies and cryptographic hash functions: quantifying the specificity paradox.

ABSTRACT: The specificity of the immune response is critical to its biological function, yet the generality of immune recognition implies that antibody binding is multispecific or degenerate. The current work explores and quantifies this paradox through a systems analysis approach that incorporates set theoretic ideas and an application of structural and statistical modeling to prior experimental immunological and biochemical data. Order-of-magnitude estimates are computed for the average degeneracies and specificities of antibodies and epitopes using a chemico-spatial model for epitope diversity and a binary model for antibody-antigen binding. The results illustrate and quantify how the humoral immune system achieves both high specificity and high degeneracy simultaneously by effectively decoupling

SUBMITTER: Petrella RJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12627013 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature