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Some scaling principles for the immune system

Frederik W Wiegel1, Alan S Perelson

  • 1Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Amsterdam, Valckenierstraat 65, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Immunology and Cell Biology
|April 6, 2004
PubMed

Using recent progress in biological scaling, we explore the way in which the immune system of an animal scales with its mass (M). It is shown that the number of cells in a single clone of B cells should scale as M and that the B-cell repertoire scales as ln (cM), where c is a constant. The time that a B cell needs to circulate once through the organism is shown to scale as M(1/4)ln (cM). It is suggested that the scaling of other cell populations in the immune system could be derived from these scaling relations for B cells.

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