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Some Scaling Principles for the Immune System
Author(s) -
Wiegel Frederik W,
Perelson Alan S
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
immunology and cell biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.999
H-Index - 104
eISSN - 1440-1711
pISSN - 0818-9641
DOI - 10.1046/j.0818-9641.2004.01229.x
Subject(s) - scaling , immune system , clone (java method) , organism , biology , repertoire , cell , computational biology , microbiology and biotechnology , physics , immunology , mathematics , genetics , dna , geometry , acoustics
Using recent progress in biological scaling, we explore the way in which the immune system of an animal scales with its mass ( M ). It is shown that the number of cells in a single clone of B cells should scale as M and that the B‐cell repertoire scales as ln ( cM ), where c is a constant. The time that a B cell needs to circulate once through the organism is shown to scale as M 1/4 ln ( cM ). It is suggested that the scaling of other cell populations in the immune system could be derived from these scaling relations for B cells.