The affirmation of self: a new perspective on the immune system
Artificial Life
Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW (Physics)
Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW (Physics)
Tolerance vs intolerance: how affinity defines topology in an idiotypic network
ICARIS'06 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Artificial Immune Systems
Not all balls are round: an investigation of alternative recognition-region shapes
ICARIS'05 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Artificial Immune Systems
Immune Systems and Computation: An Interdisciplinary Adventure
UC '08 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Unconventional Computing
Structure versus function: a topological perspective on immune networks
Natural Computing: an international journal
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Previous studies have shown that there is an intricate relationship between the topology of an idiotypic network and its resulting properties. However, empirical studies can only be performed by preselecting both a shape-space and affinity function. This introduces a number of simplifications into any model and makes it subsequently difficult to abstract the underlying contribution made by the topology from the particular instantiation of the model. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the potential network as a method in which abstract network topologies can be directly studied which allows us to bypass any definition of shape-space and affinity function. By using ideas from complex network theory to study a variety of homogeneous and heterogeneous potential networks, we show that bi-partide and heterogeneous topologies are able to tolerate antigens in certain regions, where as those showing high levels of clustering are unable to do so. It is also shown that the equilibrium topology resulting from traditional immune dynamics depends dramatically on the potential topology of a network.