Correlations in the T-cell response to altered peptide ligands

The vertebrate immune system is a wonder of modern evolution. Occasionally, however, correlations within the immune system lead to inappropriate recruitment of pre-existing T-cells against novel viral diseases. We present a random energy theory for the correlations in the naive and memory T-cell immune responses. The nonlinear susceptibility of the random energy model to structural changes captures the correlations in the immune response to mutated antigens. We show how the sequence-level diversity of the T-cell repertoire drives the dynamics of the immune response against mutated viral antigens.