Quantitative Immunology for Physicists

Abstract

The adaptive immune system is a dynamical, self-organized multiscale system that protects vertebrates from both pathogens and internal irregularities, such as tumours. For these reason it fascinates physicists, yet the multitude of different cells, molecules and sub-systems is often also petrifying. Despite this complexity, as experiments on different scales of the adaptive immune system become more quantitative, many physicists have made both theoretical and experimental contributions that help predict the behaviour of ensembles of cells and molecules that participate in an immune response. Here we review some recent contributions with an emphasis on quantitative questions and methodologies. We also provide a more general methods section that presents some of the wide array of theoretical tools used in the field.

78 page review

References in corpus (6)

• Kinetics of protein-DNA interaction: facilitated target location in sequence-dependent potential
• Statistical inference of the generation probability of T-cell receptors from sequence repertoires
• Predicting evolution from the shape of genealogical trees
• Quantifying selection in immune receptor repertoires
• How many different clonotypes do immune repertoires contain?
• Untangling the hairball: fitness based asymptotic reduction of biological networks

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Early life imprints the hierarchy of T cell clone sizes
• Immune cells use active tugging forces to distinguish affinity and accelerate evolution
• Extreme value statistics of positive recurrent centrally biased random walks
• Understanding how T helper cells learn to coordinate effective immune responses through the lens of reinforcement learning