Hello all, The next MaPSS seminar will be held on Monday, the 19th of March at 17:00 in Carslaw 535. It’s a great opportunity to see an interesting talk, meet some fellow postgrads, and get some free pizza and soft drink. ************************************************************************************** Speaker: Pantea Pooladvand (The University of Sydney) Title: Do T cells compete for antigen? Abstract: When a pathogen invasion begins, our bodies immune response is two-fold. First, the T cells will go through a rapid expansion phase, in order to fight off the intruders, followed by a contraction phase which subsequently contributes to immunological memory. It is difficult to assess the contribution of initial T cell numbers to the total T cell numbers at the peak of the response due to the widely differing views in recent publications. Does the initial number of T cells determine the peak or is the T cell response limited by the amount of antigen present? Inspired by new experimental results from our collaborators, we introduce a system of ODEs to investigate this problem by considering that T cells compete for limited amount of pathogen. We propose that this competition between T cells limits the peak of response and we compare the dynamics from this system to our collaboratorsâ data. To further explore this problem, we consider a published model based on the opposing view, that T cell replication is an inbuilt developmental program. Can this model also explain the experimental results or is competition a better explanation of this phenomenon? ************************************************************************************** See you there!