Quantifying structure in immune receptor epitope maps

Adaptive immunity is driven by specific binding of hyper-variable receptors to diverse molecular targets. The many-to-many mapping between receptors and their epitope targets determines how the immune system senses threats, but an understanding of its global structure has remained elusive. In my talk I will introduce an analytical framework to quantify structure in recent high-throughput measurements of such maps. I will discuss how a combination of ideas from population genetics, molecular biophysics, and machine learning is enabling us decipher the probabilistic rules of the degenerate molecular binding code of the immune system.