How a well-adapted immune system is organized.

ABSTRACT: 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 framework for predicting the optimal repertoire that minimizes the cost of infections contracted from a given distribution of pathogens. The theory predicts that the immune system will have more receptors for rare antigens than expected from the frequency of encounters; individuals exposed to the same infections will have sparse repertoires that are largely different, but nevertheless exploit cross-reactivity to provide the same coverage of antigens; and the optimal repertoires can be reached via the dynamics of competitive binding of antigens by receptor

SUBMITTER: Mayer A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4434741 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature