title: The Oral Tolerance as a Complex Network Phenomenon.
abstract: The phenomenon of oral tolerance refers to a local and systemic state of tolerance induced in the gut after its exposure to innocuous antigens. Recent findings have shown the interrelationship between cellular and molecular components of oral tolerance, but its representation through a network of interactions has not been investigated. Our work aims at identifying the causal relationship of each element in an oral tolerance network, and also to propose a phenomenological model that's capable of predicting the stochastic behavior of this network when under manipulation. We compared the changes of a "healthy" network caused by "knock-outs" (KOs) in two approaches: an analytical approach by the Perron Frobenius theory; and a computational approach, which we describe within this work in order to find numerical results for the model. Both approaches have shown the most relevant immunological components for this phenomena, that happens to corroborate the empirical results from animal models. Besides explain in a intelligible fashion how the components interacts in a complex manner, we also managed to describe and quantify the importance of KOs that hasn't been empirically tested.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, State University of Ponta Grossa, Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil.
authors.forename: Pedro Jeferson
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Miranda
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, State University of Ponta Grossa, Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil.
authors.forename: Murilo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Delgobo
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, State University of Ponta Grossa, Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil.
authors.forename: Giovani Favero
authors.initials: GF
authors.lastname: Marino
authors.affiliation: Department of Structural Biology, Molecular and Genetics, State University of Ponta Grossa, Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil.
authors.forename: Kátia Sabrina
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Paludo
authors.affiliation: Institute for Complex Systems and Mathematical Biology, SUPA, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Murilo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: da Silva Baptista
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, State University of Ponta Grossa, Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil.
authors.forename: Sandro Ely
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: de Souza Pinto
mesh_terms: D000284:Administration, Oral; D000818:Animals; D004361:Drug Tolerance / Q000276:immunology*; D007108:Immune Tolerance; D023421:Models, Animal; D008962:Models, Theoretical