Analysis of Biochemical Equilibria Relevant to the Immune Response: Finding the Dissociation Constants

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-1-2012

Abstract

This paper analyzes the biochemical equilibria between bivalent receptors, homo-bifunctional ligands, monovalent inhibitors, and their complexes. Such reaction schemes arise in the immune response, where immunoglobulins (bivalent receptors) bind to pathogens or allergens. The equilibria may be described by an infinite system of algebraic equations, which accounts for complexes of arbitrary size n (n being the number of receptors present in the complex). The system can be reduced to just 3 algebraic equations for the concentrations of free (unbound) receptor, free ligand and free inhibitor. Concentrations of all other complexes can be written explicitly in terms of these variables. We analyze how concentrations of key (experimentally-measurable) quantities vary with system parameters. Such measured quantities can furnish important information about dissociation constants in the system, which are difficult to obtain by other means. We provide analytical expressions and suggest specific experiments that could be used to determine the dissociation constants. © 2012 Society for Mathematical Biology.

Identifier

84859217857 (Scopus)

Publication Title

Bulletin of Mathematical Biology

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11538-012-9716-2

e-ISSN

15229602

ISSN

00928240

First Page

1171

Last Page

1206

Issue

5

Volume

74

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