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Journal of Virology, June 2009, p. 5928-5932, Vol. 83, No. 11
0022-538X/09/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/JVI.02587-08
Copyright © 2009, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
,
John W. Barrett,1,2,
Yiyue Ma,1,2
Gregory A. Dekaban,1,2,
and
Grant McFadden1,3*
BioTherapeutics Research Group, Robarts Research Institute,1 Department of Microbiology and Immunology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada,2 Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida3
Received 15 December 2008/ Accepted 13 March 2009
Mouse embryo fibroblasts (MEFs) are a widely used cell culture system in life sciences, including virology. Here, we show that although primary MEFs are nonpermissive to myxoma virus replication, the corresponding immortalized MEFs support a highly productive myxoma virus infection. We further demonstrate that this permissive phenotype for myxoma virus in immortalized MEFs is due to the immortalization-associated selective block to the cellular alpha/beta interferon induction machinery involved in responding to myxoma virus challenge. Thus, our report presents a clear example, illustrating that a drastic phenotypic alteration can occur with respect to virus infection between primary cells and their immortalized counterparts.
Published ahead of print on 18 March 2009.
Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://jvi.asm.org/.
These authors contributed equally to the work.
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