The recognition of antigen by an antibody (cell receptor) leads to network activation, while the recognition of an
idiotope by another antibody results in network suppression.
Antibody Ab2 is said to be the internal image of the antigen Ag, because Ab1 is capable of recognising the antigen and
also Ab2.According to the immune network theory, the receptor molecules contained in the surface of the immune
cells present markers, named idiotopes, which can be recognised by receptors on other immune cells. These
idiotopes are displayed in and/or around the same portions of the receptors that recognise nonself antigens. Figure 3
provides an illustration of the immune network theory. The recognition of idiotopes on a cell receptor by other cell
receptors, lead to ever increasing sets of connected cell receptors and molecules. The recognition of a cell receptor
by another cell receptor results in network suppression, while the recognition of an antigen by a cell receptor results
in network activation and cell proliferation while The recognition of cell receptors by other cell receptors leads to
network suppression. The original theory did not account explicitly for the results of network activation and/or suppression, and the various artificial immune networks found in the literature model it in a particular form.
The work presented in [8] makes use of the clonal selection algorithm (CLONALG), to explain how the immune
network model responds to nonself antigens i.e. becomes activated.
Given a set of patterns (P) to be recognised, the basic algorithm runs as follows: