An abstraction and an investigation to the worth of dendritic cells (DCs) ability to collect, process and present antigens are presented.Computationally, this ability is shown to provide a feature reduction mechanism that could be used to reduce the complexity of a search space, a mechanism for development of highly specialized detector sets as well as a selective mechanism used in directing subsets of detectors to be activated when certain danger signals are present.It is shown that DCs, primed by different danger signals, provide a basis for different anomaly detection pathways.Different antigen-peptides are developed based on different danger signals present, and these peptides are presented to different adaptive layer detectors that correspond to the given danger signal.Experiments are then undertaken that compare current approaches, where a full antigen structure and the whole repertoire of detectors are used, with the proposed approach.Experiment results indicate that such an approach is feasible and can help reduce the complexity of the problem by significant levels.It also improves the efficiency of the system, given that only a subset of detectors are involved during the detection process.Having several different sets of detectors increases the robustness of the resulting system.Detectors developed based on peptides are also highly discriminative, which reduces the false positives rates, making the approach feasible for a real time environment.