Calendar

Physics Colloquium: Prediction in immune repertoires

Speaker: Aleksandra Walczak
Date: 12/8/2021
Time: 10 a.m.
Event Contact: Marjorie Gamel
217-333-3762
mgamel@illinois.edu
Sponsor: Department of Physics
Event Type: Seminar/Symposium
 

Living systems often attempt to calculate and predict the future state of the environment.  Given the stochastic nature of many biological systems how is that possible? I will show that even a system as complicated as the immune system has reproducible outcomes. Yet predicting the future state of a complex environment requires weighing the trust in new observations against prior experiences. In this light, I will present a view of the adaptive immune system as a dynamic Bayesian machinery that updates its memory repertoire by balancing evidence from new pathogen encounters against past experience of infection to predict and prepare for future threats.