MaPSS: Maths Postgraduate Seminar Series: Pooladvand -- Do T cells compete for antigen?

Hello all, 

The next MaPSS seminar will be held on Monday, the 19th of March at 17:00 in Carslaw
535.  It's a great opportunity to see an interesting talk, meet some fellow postgrads,
and get some free pizza and soft drink.  

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Speaker: Pantea Pooladvand (The University of Sydney) 

Title: Do T cells compete for antigen? 

Abstract: When a pathogen invasion begins, our bodies immune response is two-fold.
First, the T cells will go through a rapid expansion phase, in order to fight off the
intruders, followed by a contraction phase which subsequently contributes to
immunological memory.  It is difficult to assess the contribution of initial T cell
numbers to the total T cell numbers at the peak of the response due to the widely
differing views in recent publications.  Does the initial number of T cells determine
the peak or is the T cell response limited by the amount of antigen present? Inspired by
new experimental results from our collaborators, we introduce a system of ODEs to
investigate this problem by considering that T cells compete for limited amount of
pathogen.  We propose that this competition between T cells limits the peak of response
and we compare the dynamics from this system to our collaborators’ data.  To further
explore this problem, we consider a published model based on the opposing view, that T
cell replication is an inbuilt developmental program.  Can this model also explain the
experimental results or is competition a better explanation of this phenomenon? 

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See you there!