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Modelling the Dynamics of T-Cell Development in the Thymus
Version 1
: Received: 18 January 2021 / Approved: 19 January 2021 / Online: 19 January 2021 (16:39:50 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Robert, P.A.; Kunze-Schumacher, H.; Greiff, V.; Krueger, A. Modeling the Dynamics of T-Cell Development in the Thymus. Entropy 2021, 23, 437. Robert, P.A.; Kunze-Schumacher, H.; Greiff, V.; Krueger, A. Modeling the Dynamics of T-Cell Development in the Thymus. Entropy 2021, 23, 437.
Abstract
The thymus hosts the development of a specific type of adaptive immune cells called T cells. T cells orchestrate the adaptive immune response through recognition of antigen by the highly variable T-cell receptor (TCR). T-cell development is a tightly coordinated process comprising lineage commitment, somatic recombination of Tcr gene loci and selection for functional, but non-self-reactive TCRs, all interspersed with massive proliferation and cell death. Thus, the thymus produces a pool of T cells throughout life capable of responding to virtually any exogenous attack while preserving the body through self-tolerance. The thymus has been of considerable interest to both immunologists and theoretical biologists due to its multiscale quantitative properties, bridging molecular binding, population dynamics and polyclonal repertoire specificity. Here, we review mathematical modelling strategies that were reported to help understand the flexible dynamics of the highly dividing and dying thymic cell populations. Furthermore, we summarize the current challenges to estimating in vivo cellular dynamics and to reaching a next-generation multiscale picture of T-cell development.
Keywords
Thymic selection; T-cell development; T-cell receptor (TCR); mathematical modelling; multiscale models; complex systems; ordinary differential equations (ODE); agent-based models.
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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