統計的情報処理としての細胞の分子識別と、免疫学的自己/非自己識別制御への応用

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Immune T cells recognize antigenic peptides using receptor molecules on the cell surface, and discriminate between target and non-target ligands even though the difference is only a single amino acid substitution. This ligand recognition is conducted by a reaction system composed of a relatively small number of receptor molecules. However, little is known about the mechanism for accurate ligand discrimination under the stochastic noise due to the small number effect. In this study, we mathematically modeled and analyzed immune T cells' antigen recognition reaction systems. We clarified the reaction network structure that non-linearly amplifies the difference between the target and non-target ligands by utilizing noise. We also analyzed parameters that can control ligand discrimination accuracy and threshold of target and non-target ligands.