{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/broad-cross-reactivity-of-the-t-cell","title":"Broad cross-reactivity of the T-cell repertoire achieves specific and sufficiently rapid target searching","arxiv_id":"1712.04633","date":"2017-12-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jin Xu","Junghyo Jo"],"abstract":"The molecular recognition of T-cell receptors is the hallmark of the adaptive immunity. Given the finiteness of the T-cell repertoire, individual T-cell receptors are necessary to be cross-reactive to multiple antigenic peptides. In this study, we quantify the variability of the cross-reactivity by using a string model that estimates the binding affinity between two sequences of amino acids. We examine sequences of 10,000 human T-cell receptors and 10,000 antigenic peptides, and obtain a full spectrum of cross-reactivity of the receptor-peptide binding. Then, we find that the cross-reactivity spectrum is broad. Some T cells are reactive to 1,000 peptides, but some T cells are reactive to only one or two peptides. Since the degree of cross-reactivity has a correlation with the (un)binding affinity of receptors, we further investigate how the broad crossreactivity affects the target searching of T cells. High cross-reactive T cells may not require many trials for searching correct targets, but they may spend long time to unbind from incorrect targets. In contrast, low cross-reactive T cells may not spend long time to ignore incorrect targets, but they require many trials for screening correct targets. We evaluate this hypothesis, and show that the broad cross-reactivity of the natural T-cell repertoire can balance the trade-off between the rapid screening and unbinding penalty.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04633v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.04633v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"broad-cross-reactivity-of-the-t-cell","repo_url":"https://github.com/SunnyXu/Broad-crossreactivity-of-the-T-cell-repertoire-achieves-specific-and-rapid-target-searching","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}