Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-27-2011

Publication Title

Autoimmunity

Volume

44

Issue

4

First Page

304

Last Page

314

Abstract

The relationship between biological research and mathematical modeling is complex, critical, and vital. In this review, we summarize the results of the collaboration between two laboratories, exploring the interaction between mathematical modeling and wet-lab immunology. During this collaboration several aspects of the immune defence against viral infections were investigated, focusing primarily on the subject of heterologous immunity. In this manuscript, we emphasize the topics where computational simulations were applied in conjunction with experiments, such as immune attrition, the growing and shrinking of cross-reactive T cell repertoires following repeated infections, the short and long-term effects of cross-reactive immunological memory, and the factors influencing the appearance of new clonal specificities. For each topic, we describe how the mathematical model used was adapted to answer specific biological questions, and we discuss the hypotheses that were generated by simulations. Finally, we propose rules for testing hypotheses that emerge from model experimentation in the wet lab, and vice-versa.

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Africa Review on 27/01/2011, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/08916934.2010.523220.

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