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.
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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0130762 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | PloS ONE |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Early online date | 26 Jun 2015 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 26 Jun 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Date of Acceptance: 23/05/2015Funding: MSB acknowledges the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) - UK grant EP/I032606/1. PJM and MD received regular scholarships from the Brazilian the following agency: Higher Education Personnel Training Coordination (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior) CAPES http://www.fisica.uepg.br:7080/ppgfisica/. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.