Modeling Repertoire Behavior within the Energy-Based Framework: A Study on Cell Proliferation and Somatic Hypermutation during the Adaptive Immune Response

Abstract

Monitoring and describing the adaptive immune repertoire(IR) is essential in healthcare research. Several indicators have been invented to quantify the static property of IR, while its dynamic collective behavior remains not fully studied. Here, we present a mathematical and physical model to interpret the cell proliferation and somatic hypermutation(SHM) process in IR, difficulties to generate different clones are computed and IR distance is calculated as the minimum effort required to transform one repertoire distribution to another. IR diversity are shown to be intensive properties and remain constant across datasets with different sample size. The differences in IR observed in mice and clinical samples from various health conditions and immune stages confirm the features we have depicted. Our work dynamically characterize and quantify IR process, enabling a macroscopic immunoevaluation by sensitive immune fluctuation detection from minute samples.