To be or Not to be Ridded? – That is the Question Addressed by the Associative Antigen Recognition Model^{* †}

Cohn, M
Langman, R. E.

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA

^*This essay is based on a talk in the ‘Current Controversies’ sessions of the ICI in Stockholm, 2001.

^†This work was supported by NIH Grant RR07716-13.

Scandinavian Journal of Immunology 55(4):p 318-323, April 2002.

Cohn M, Langman RE. To be or Not to be Ridded? – That is the Question Addressed by the Associative Antigen Recognition Model. Scand J Immunol 2002;55:318–323

The reasons that germline-encoded recognitive sites cannot sort the immune system's large and random somatically generated repertoire into anti-Not-to-be-ridded (‘self ’) and anti-To-be-ridded (‘nonself ’) specificities are analysed. The immune system cannot use ‘nonself ’-markers of To-be-ridded antigens (‘Danger’, toll receptors, pathogenicity, localization, etc.) to sort the repertoire; it may, however, use them to determine the magnitude and class of the effector response.

To be or Not to be Ridded? – That is the Question Addressed by the Associative Antigen Recognition Model* †

To be or Not to be Ridded? – That is the Question Addressed by the Associative Antigen Recognition Model^{* †}