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SUMMARY:Specificity and Tolerance of the Immune T Cell Repertoire - Mehran
  Kardar (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
DTSTART:20250912T085500Z
DTEND:20250912T093500Z
UID:TALK233377@talks.cam.ac.uk
DESCRIPTION:The adaptive immune system protects the body from an ever-chan
 ging landscape of foreign pathogens. The two arms of the adaptive immune s
 ystem\, T cells and B cells\, mount specific responses to pathogens by uti
 lizing the diversity of their receptors\, generated through hypermutation.
  T cells recognize and clear infected hosts when their highly variable rec
 eptors bind sufficiently strongly to antigen-derived peptides displayed on
  a cell surface. To avoid auto-immune responses\, randomly generated recep
 tors that bind strongly to self-peptides are eliminated in the &ldquo\;cen
 tral" process of thymic selection\, ensuring a mostly self-tolerant repert
 oire of mature T cells. &ldquo\;Peripheral&rdquo\; tolerance\, including a
  quorum mechanism further protects against self-targeting T cells that esc
 ape thymic selection. We discuss how these mechanisms can still fail durin
 g persistent infections.&nbsp\;
LOCATION:External
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