ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Affinity maturation for an optimal balance between long-term immune coverage and short-term resource constraints.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Design principles of the cytotoxic CD8Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Enteroviral epitope mimicry enables NK cell-mediated targeting of ASPH in hepatocellular carcinoma.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Dynamics of memory B cells and plasmablasts in healthy individuals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Modeling the Synergetic Dynamics of B cells and TbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- SARS-CoV-2 antibody and neutralization dynamics among persons with natural- and vaccine-induced exposures.PloS one · 2025Article
- A bioengineered anti-VEGF protein with high affinity and high concentration for intravitreal treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration.Bioengineering & translational medicine · 2024Article
- Steering and controlling evolution - from bioengineering to fighting pathogens.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2023Review
- Evolutionary stability of antigenically escaping viruses.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Article
- Two complementary features of humoral immune memory confer protection against the same or variant antigens.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- How the Immune System Learns.PRX lifeArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In order to target threatening pathogens, the adaptive immune system performs a continuous reorganization of its lymphocyte repertoire. Following an immune challenge, the B cell repertoire can evolve cells of increased specificity for the encountered strain. This process of affinity maturation generates a memory pool whose diversity and size remain difficult to predict. We assume that the immune system follows a strategy that maximizes the long-term immune coverage and minimizes the short-term metabolic costs associated with affinity maturation. This strategy is defined as an optimal decision process on a finite dimensional phenotypic space, where a preexisting population of cells is sequentially challenged with a neutrally evolving strain. We show that the low specificity and high diversity of memory B cells-a key experimental result-can be explained as a strategy to protect against pathogens that evolve fast enough to escape highly potent but narrow memory. This plasticity of the repertoire drives the emergence of distinct regimes for the size and diversity of the memory pool, depending on the density of de novo responding cells and on the mutation rate of the strain. The model predicts power-law distributions of clonotype sizes observed in data and rationalizes antigenic imprinting as a strategy to minimize metabolic costs while keeping good immune protection against future strains.
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