Dominant Self Research Articles

The dominant self and the cryptic self: shaping the autoreactive T-cell repertoire

Deletion of autoreactive T cells during the induction of self tolerance has been directly demonstrated. However, it is still relatively easy to detect self reactivity in normal healthy animals. In this article, Guy Gammon, Eli Sercarz and Gilles Benichou speculate on which T cells may escape tolerance induction and discuss how these cells could subsequently be involved in autoimmunity.

How Many Selves Make Me?

Cartesian accounts of the mental make it axiomatic that consciousness is transparent: what I feel, I know I feel, however many errors I may make about its cause. ‘I’ names a simple, unextended, irreducible substance, created ex nihilo or eternally existent, and only associated with the complete, extended, dissoluble substance or pretend-substance that is ‘my’ body by divine fiat. Good moderns take it for granted that ‘we’ now realize how shifting, foggy and deconstructible are the boundaries of the self; ‘we’ know that our own motives, feelings and intentions constantly escape us; ‘I’ names only the current speaker, or the momentarily dominant self among many fluid identities.

The Presentation of Self-Peptides: Tolerance and Competition

Within the last 15 years, the pendulum of immune preoccupation has swung vigorously in the direction of the self. It is now commonplace to note that the T cell repertoire is acquired through a complex positive and negative selective process of recognition of self molecules in an MHC context. Accordingly, the repertoire “directed against foreign antigens” merely represents fortuitous cross-reactivity by the T cells selected by means of self-determinants.The definition of “self” protein or self-T cell determinant is not an unambiguous one. The most inclusive definition would enumerate all overlapping sequences of 15 amino acids of all proteins coded for by the DNA of the organism including any mutants. A clearly more restrictive definition would only include those proteins that have access to the immune system and the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). Still more restrictive is the idea of a “dominant self” that includes only those determinants which are easily processed and presented, and which can bi...