title: Theories and quantification of thymic selection.
abstract: The peripheral T cell repertoire is sculpted from prototypic T cells in the thymus bearing randomly generated T cell receptors (TCR) and by a series of developmental and selection steps that remove cells that are unresponsive or overly reactive to self-peptide-MHC complexes. The challenge of understanding how the kinetics of T cell development and the statistics of the selection processes combine to provide a diverse but self-tolerant T cell repertoire has invited quantitative modeling approaches, which are reviewed here.
authors.affiliation: Departments of Systems and Computational Biology, Microbiology and Immunology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine , New York, NY , USA.
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Yates
keywords: T cells; mathematical modeling; repertoire selection; theoretical biology; thymic selection