How the Immune System Generates Diversity: Pathogen Space Coverage with Random and Evolved Antibody Libraries

Mihaela Oprea and Stephanie Forrest

Working Papers from Santa Fe Institute

Abstract: The immune system uses many strategies to generate its enormous repertoire of diverse antibodies, but their relative importance is not understood. As part of a larger project to quantify their relative contributions, we have studied how the survival probability of an individual scales with the size of its germline-encoded antibody repertoire [11], in the context of a shape-space model [12]. Shape-space models are a popular modeling device, but it is unclear how realistic they are for studying real biological data [1]. Here, we introduce a more general framework, in which we can study many antibody-pathogen matching rules, including the shape-space model. We use the genetic algorithm as a model of evolution to explore the behavior of the evolved antibody repertoires. For the antibody/pathogen matching rules that we studied, the scaling relation between fitness and the size of the evolved antibody library is only a shifted variant of the scaling relation that we obtain with random libraries of the same size. We also analyze the type of antibodies that are evolved by our genetic algorithm, comparing them to the germline encoded antibodies that are expressed in newborns. We discuss the implications of our results for recent experiments with phage antibody libraries.

Submitted to 1999 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference.

Keywords: Antibody repertoire; evolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-02
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wop:safiwp:99-02-014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Santa Fe Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Krichel (krichel@openlib.org).