Daniel Luque Duque

Short description of my project:

A T cell receptor can recognise a set of peptides presented by MHC, these can be foreign which cause an immune response, or the can be produced by the body itself which provide T cells with survival stimulus and cause them to divide. When considering several clonotype these sets of peptides can overlap, this is called cross-reactivity and it can be seen in the form of one infection causing immunity to more than one pathogen.

The aim of my project is to use stochastic models to study how cross-reactivity of self peptides influences the populations of clonotypes that compete for survival stimulus. The second aim of the project is to use a stochastic model of of T cell clonotypes during infection to study the effects of cross-reactivity on the initial immune response, and subsequent memory responses. A second part of this is to study how clonal expansion during the immune response perturbs the distribution of clonal sizes after contraction back to homeostasis.