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Updated: Jul 26, 2026

Bead Aggregation Assays for the Characterization of Putative Cell Adhesion Molecules
Published on: October 17, 2014
To be or Not to be ridded?--That is the question addressed by the associative antigen recognition model
1The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA 92186-5800, USA. cohn@salk.edu
Abstract:
The reasons that germline-encoded recognitive sites cannot sort the immune system's large and random somatically generated repertoire into anti-Not-to-be-ridded ('self ') and anti-To-be-ridded ('nonself ') specificities are analysed. The immune system cannot use 'nonself '-markers of To-be-ridded antigens ('Danger', toll receptors, pathogenicity, localization, etc.) to sort the repertoire; it may, however, use them to determine the magnitude and class of the effector response.
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