Antigenesis: A cascade-theoretical analysis of the size distributions of antigen—antibody complexes

AbstractVarious ad hoc approaches have been employed for the calculation of statistical properties of antigen—antibody complex systems. These approaches, however, overlook the fact that a systematic approach to such problems is available within the scope of the class of random graph processes known as branching or cascade processes. In this paper, we introduce, with sufficient detail for the reader to follow, the details of a cascade theoretical model for antigen—antibody systems and show how the molecular weight distribution for a particular system may be explored. The advantage of this systematic approach lies both in the ease with which statistical quantities can be computed once the model is set up, and the facility with which any simplifying assumptions of the model can be described and possibly relaxed should the need to do so arise