Diversity of immune receptor repertoires

Aleksandra Walczak (LPT-ENS, Paris) — December 17, 2015

Recognition of pathogens relies on the diversity of immune receptor proteins. Recent experiments that sequence the entire immune cell repertoires provide a new opportunity for quantitative insight into naturally occurring diversity and how it is generated. I will show how applying statistical inference to recent experiments that sequence entire immune repertoires we can quantify diversity of this functional ensemble. I will discuss these results from the perspective of optimal repertoires.

Biography :
Aleksandra Walczak received her PhD in physics at UCSD working on models of stochastic gene expression. After a graduate fellowship at KITP, she was a Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics Fellow, focusing on applying information theory to signal processing in small gene regulatory networks. Currently she is a CNRS researcher at ENS, working mainly on understanding how the diversity in immune repertoires is generated and maintained, a research funded by an ERC grant. She obtained the "prix Jacques Herbrand de l’Académie des sciences" in 2014.

You can also watch this video on the multimedia site ENS : savoirs.ens.fr