Theory 11/Specialisation vs Robustness/Immunology
Narrow Memory Misses Variants
The claim
Immune memory narrowed to one strain trades against cross-protection, so a response with the highest titre to the current strain can be the weakest against the next.
01Mechanism
Affinity maturation concentrates the repertoire on immunodominant epitopes; narrowing improves potency against the strain and reduces breadth.
02Prediction
Strain-specific titre should anti-correlate with variant coverage.
03Refutation
Titre and breadth varying together would remove the trade-off.