Theories of immune recognition: Is anybody right?

🤖 Plain-English Summary

The clonal selection theory (CST) is the centrepiece of the current paradigm used to explain immune recognition and memory. We point out their main weaknesses and highlight arguments made by their opponents and believers.

🔑 Key Findings

• Throughout the past decades, the original CST had been expanded and modified to explain new experimental evidences since its original publication by Burnet.
• This gave origin to new paradigms that govern experimental immunology nowadays, such as the associative recognition of antigen model and the stranger/danger signal model.
• However, these new theories also do not fully explain experimental findings such as natural autoimmune immunoglobulins, idiotypic networks, low and high dose tolerance, and dual-receptor T and B cells.

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