Abstract
Marek’s disease virus (MDV) is an alphaherpesvirus that causes Marek’s disease, a malignant lymphoproliferative disease of domestic chickens. While MDV vaccines protect animals from clinical disease, they do not provide sterilizing immunity and allow field strains to circulate and evolve in vaccinated flocks. Therefore, there is a need for improved vaccines and for a better understanding of innate and adaptive immune responses against MDV infections. Interferons (IFNs) play important roles in the innate immune defenses against viruses and induce upregulation of a cellular antiviral state. In this report, we quantified the potent antiviral effect of IFNα and IFNγ against MDV infections in vitro. Moreover, we demonstrate that both cytokines can delay Marek’s disease onset and progression in vivo. Additionally, blocking of endogenous IFNα using a specific monoclonal antibody, in turn, accelerated disease. In summary, our data reveal the effects of IFNα and IFNγ on MDV infection and improve our understanding of innate immune responses against this oncogenic virus.
Highlights
The highly oncogenic Marek’s disease virus (MDV) infects chickens and is a major burden for poultry farming worldwide
While type I IFNs are secreted by many different cell types, IFNγ is predominantly produced by T helper 1 cells and natural killer cells [6]
We could demonstrate that IFNα, but not IFNβ, was released into the supernatant upon infection of primary Chicken embryo cells (CEC) with MDV (Figure S1)
Summary
The highly oncogenic Marek’s disease virus (MDV) infects chickens and is a major burden for poultry farming worldwide. Despite the widespread use of vaccines, MDV remains a serious threat to poultry and causes substantial economic losses worldwide every year [1]. This lymphotropic alphaherpesvirus replicates in different immune cell types such as B and T cells [2] and can establish a latent infection of CD4+ T cells which is a prerequisite for malignant transformation of these cells [3,4]. Interferons (IFNs) are cytokines that possess strong antiviral properties and are a major component of the innate antiviral host defense They can be divided into type I (IFNα and IFNβ), type II (IFNγ), and type III (IFNλ) IFNs, based on their structural and functional features [6]. It has been shown that IFNs are expressed as an antiviral response to MDV infections in vitro [9,10] and in infected chickens [11,12,13,14,15,16]
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