Mouse Hepatitis Virus Receptor as a Determinant of the Mouse Susceptibility to MHV Infection

Taguchi, Fumihiro; Hirai-Yuki, Asuka

Two other molecules, CEACAM2 (Nedellec et al., 1994) and pregnancy-specific glycoprotein (PSG; Chen et al., 1995) , have so far been reported to work as MHV receptor. These proteins, however, seem unlikely to function as an MHV receptor in the mouse, since CEACAM1 knockout mice produced in Beauchemin lab showed complete resistance to MHV-A59 infection (Hemmila et al., 2004) ,. Moreover, as there are no substantial differences in amino acid sequences in those two receptor proteins expressed in B6 and SJL, there is little possibility that those proteins are involved in the differences of MHV susceptibility between SJL and chimeric mice. One point to be further studied is the effect of FVB Cre mouse that is used to exclude neomycin resistant gene from initially produced chimeric mouse (Hirai et al., 2010) . To exclude the FVB mouse genes, we performed the backcross of neomycin deleted mouse to B6 mouse by 11 generations, however, some FVB mouse gene still remaining in backcrossed mice could have some unexpected effects on the chimeric mice. It is important to study whether any of FVB mouse genes are involved in the high resistance of chimeric mice.