The surprising contrast between the first and last cases discussed in Fig. 7 (top and bottom rows) can be reinterpreted using the notion of avidity maturation, a phenomenon observed experimentally in [42] when high-risk human subjects (with one eventually developing T1D) exhibited an increase in the level of avidity of GAD555-reactive CD4 T cells with time. This evidence concerns the gene CD4 and type 1 diabetes mellitus.