Abstract | Certain viruses kill off memory T-cells early in infection and thus create lymphopenic conditions in a process called active attrition; following this, memory and naïve T-cells proliferate (and differentiate if necessary) to refill the memory T-cell compartment. I mathematically examine how active attrition and subsequent lymphopenic proliferation impact the memory CD8+ T-cell repertoire using a combination of hypergeometric distributions and Markov birth processes. This gives insight into how the immune memory repertoire changes with infections. |