Towards a quantitative theory of tolerance

A cornerstone of the classical view of tolerance is the elimination of self-reactive T cells during negative selection in the thymus. However, high-throughput T-cell receptor sequencing data has so far failed to detect substantial signatures of negative selection in the observed repertoires. In addition, quantitative estimates as well as recent experiments suggest that the elimination of self-reactive T cells is at best incomplete. We discuss several recent theoretical ideas that can explain tol...