Viral Infection of Transgenic Mice Expressing a Viral Protein in Oligodendrocytes Leads to Chronic Central Nervous System Autoimmune Disease

Evans, Claire F.; Horwitz, Marc S.; Hobbs, Monte V.; Oldstone, Michael B.A.

To characterize the nature of the CNS-directed immune response, RNA extracts from the brains of MBP-NP transgenic positive and negative mice undergoing the double infection protocol were subjected to an RNase protection assay using probes to a number of cytokines (20) . Brains from transgenic mice first infected with LCMV, secondarily infected 6 wk later with either LCMV or VV-NP, and sacrificed after another 4 wk, contained increased message levels of the following cytokines when compared with Following a second viral infection with LCMV or VV-NP, transgenic positive and negative mice were tested for motor impairment on the rotorod apparatus. As seen in Fig. 5 B, transgenic negative mice performed significantly better than the transgenic positive mice over three trials on the rotorod. These differences in rotorod balancing indicated motor coordination dysfunction in the doubly infected transgenic mice (26, 27) .