Modeling of t cell population development and estimation of resource allocation effectiveness

In this paper, the mathematical model of age-related changes in population of peripheral T cells (Romanyukha, Yashin, 2001) is used to describe immune life history during all postnatal life, including childhood. The treatise is based on the assumption of linear dependence of antigenic load from basal metabolic rate, which, in turn, depends on body mass following the allometric relationship — 3/4 power scaling law (Kleiber, 1932; West, Brown, 2005). Energy cost of infection burden, i.e. the energy needed to produce and maintain immune cells plus the energy loss during infectious diseases, is estimated and used as a measure of immune system effectiveness. The dependence of optimal resource allocation from the parameters of infection burden is studied.