Virus- and Interferon Alpha-Induced Transcriptomes of Cells from the Microbat Myotis daubentonii

Hölzer, Martin; Schoen, Andreas; Wulle, Julia; Müller, Marcel A.; Drosten, Christian; Marz, Manja; Weber, Friedemann

The aim of our study was to obtain the full picture of the antiviral type I IFN response of the Yangochiroptera microbat representative M. daubentonii, using a kidney cell line (MyDauNi/2c) described previously (Fuchs et al., 2017; Muller et al., 2012) . IFNs have anti-proliferative activity, which is the reason why many cell lines have lost their ability to induce IFN and/or to respond to IFN over their passaging history (Hess et al., 2012) . MyDauNi/2c cells, however, exhibited the typical phosphorylation of STAT1 in response to exogenously added pan-species IFN-a B/D ( Figure S1A ). Moreover, STAT1 phosphorylation was downmodulated by Ruxolitinib, an established inhibitor of JAK1/2-mediated IFN signaling (Stewart et al., 2014) . STAT1 phosphorylation and Ruxolitinib effect were comparable with the IFN-competent human A549 (Kuri et al., 2010; Weber et al., 2015) and the R. aegytiacus megabat cell line Ro6E-J (Fuchs et al., 2017) that we used in parallel. These results demonstrate the capacity of the MyDauNi/2c cells to respond to IFN.