About
About this notebook
This is the research notebook of the Anastas Pashov’s lab, a team working in systems immunology — at the meeting point of big data, machine learning, and the biology of the antibody repertoire. It is part of the Laboratory of Experimental Immunotherapy at the Stephan Angeloff Institute of Microbiology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, in Sofia, a member of the International Institut Pasteur Network.
The lab studies the functional reactivity of the entire antibody repertoire, read through large libraries of peptide mimotopes selected on whole repertoires and through high-throughput binding of serum antibodies against peptide microarrays. These measurements complement antibody repertoire sequencing, and the working goal is to unite the two. Reactivity landscapes are represented as graphs and interrogated with bioinformatics, graph theory, and topological data analysis — toward diagnostics in autoimmunity, oncology, and neurodegeneration.
This site is organised around ideas. A recurring thread is the conviction that the prevailing picture of antibody binding is too simple: a more physics-based view treats specificity as the shape of an affinity distribution over epitope space, and asks whether that reframing can illuminate some unresolved problems, e.g., the physiological role of anti-idiotypic interactions. The pages here are where those questions, methods, and results are worked out in the open.