Close Contact Fluctuations: Time of Contact

Abstract

The letter resolves the long standing debate as to the proper time scale ($<\tau >$) of the onset of the immunological synapse (IS) bond, the non-covalent chemical bond defining the immune pathways involving T-cells and antigen presenting cells (APC). Results from our model calculations show $<\tau >$ to be of the order of seconds instead of minutes. Close to the linearly stable regime, we show that in between the two critical spatial thresholds defined by the integrin:ligand pair (${\Delta }_2\sim$ 40-45 nm) and the T cell receptor (TCR):pMHC bond (${\Delta }_1\sim$ 14-15 nm), $<\tau >$ grows monotonically with increasing co-receptor bond length separation $\delta$ (= ${\Delta }_2-{\Delta }_1\sim$ 26-30 nm) while $<\tau >$ decays with ${\Delta }_1$ for fixed ${\Delta }_2$. The non-universal $\delta$-dependent power-law structure of the probability density function (PDF) further explains why only the TCR:pMHC bond is a likely candidate to form a stable synapse.

arXiv comment5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

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• Persistence with Partial Survival
• An Effective Membrane Model of the Immunological Synapse
• Autocorrelation exponent of conserved spin systems in the scaling regime following a critical quench
• Close contact fluctuations: the seeding of signalling domains in the immunological synapse

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Temporal dynamics in immunological synapse: Role of thermal fluctuations in signaling
• Statistical mechanics of clonal expansion in lymphocyte networks modelled with slow and fast variables
• A statistical physics perspective on alignment-independent protein sequence comparison
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