The Immune System in Pieces: Computational Lessons from Degeneracy in the Immune System

Abstract

The concept of degeneracy in biology, including the immune system, is well accepted and has been demonstrated to be present at many different levels. We explore this concept from a computational point of view and demonstrate how we can use computational models of degeneracy to aid the development of more biologically plausible artificial immune systems (AIS). The outcome of these models has lead us to perform an analysis of the receptor dynamics in the model and we discuss the computational implications of a "degenerate" repertoire. Through the use of the unified modelling language (UML) we have abstracted a high level immune inspire algorithm that will be used as part of a larger project to develop an immune inspired bioinformatics system