Optimal immune systems
Aleksandra Walczak et Thierry Mora
Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
Biological organisms have evolved a wide range of complex strategies to defend themselves against pa-thogens. We will present a common evolutionary framework that balances the benefits and costs involved in protection against pathogenic environments to maximize the long growth rate of populations. We will show that such a general evolutionary perspective recovers the basic forms of known immunity. We will then focus on adaptive immunity which is based on a combinatorically encoded repertoire of receptors that protects organisms from a diverse set of pathogens. A well-adapted repertoire should be tuned to the pathogenic environment to reduce the cost of infections. We will discuss a general approach for predicting the optimal repertoire that minimizes the cost of infections contracted from a given distribution of pathogens.
Recent publications:
A. Mayer, T. Mora, O. Rivoire & A. M. Walczak (2016) Diversity of immune strategies explained by adapta-tion to pathogen statistics. PNAS 113(31): 8630.
A. Mayer, V. Balasubramanian, A. M. Walczak & T. Mora. How a well-adapting immune systems remembers. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05753.
A. Mayer, V. Balasubramanian, T. Mora & A. M. Walczak. (2015) How a well-adapting immune systems is organized. PNAS. 112(19): 5950.