Figure 7.

Density-dependent recruitment model is consistent with formation of large clusters. We analyzed the data on co-clustering of Plasmodium berghei (Pb)-specific (OT-1) and control (2C) CD8 T cells from a recently published study (31). (A) There is a bias in cluster sizes toward more Pb-specific CD8 T cells per cluster. (B,C) The data on cluster distribution and fits of the DD recruitment model assuming that OT-1 (B) or 2C (C) cluster independently. In fits we fixed the exit rate from the cluster to μ = 0.5k/h. Because the experimental data were sparse and frequency of clusters of a given size were the same for different clusters, we plotted the data as a histogram by binning the data into bins with the bin size of 100. To visualize the model fits of the data, we therefore multiplied the model predictions in (B,C) by 100. Best fit parameters and estimated 95% CIs are for (B): λ₀ = 0.67 (0.54 − 0.82)/h, λ₁ = 0.69 (0.67 − 0.71)/h, and for (C): λ₀ = 0.88 (0.72 − 1.05)/h, λ₁ = 0.67 (0.65 − 0.68)/h.