📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

Adaptive humoral immunity, from the physical perspective, can be regarded as the self-organization of the binding energy landscape of antibodies. In biological terms, the humoral immune system evolves and adapts its repertoire of antigen binding molecules so as to maintain its molecular integrity by controlled removal of antibody-antigen complexes. Here we introduce a super-landscape model, created by the fusion of binding energy landscapes of the antibody repertoire, that can be described by the distribution of interaction energies and deformation parameters of chemical thermodynamic potentials in the system. These deformation parameters not only characterize the partition function of the ensemble and the network of interactions in the system but also the asymmetry of generalized logistic distributions obtained in immunoassays when probing the system. Overall, a statistical thermodynamics approach is provided for a deeper theoretical insight into the dynamical self-organization of the adaptive immune system and into the interpretation of experimental results of immunoassays.