Lung epithelial cells have virus-specific and shared gene expression responses to infection by diverse respiratory viruses

James T. VanLeuven; Benjamin J. Ridenhour; Craig R. Miller; Tanya A. Miura

As described above, several of the genes with up-regulated expression in response to all three viruses 235 and those that were unique to PR8 are induced by type I IFNs. To specifically evaluate how IFN response 236 genes were altered by the three viruses, genes that were significantly up-regulated by each virus at the 24 h 237 time point were used to query the Interferome v2.01 database (see Materials and Methods). A Venn diagram 238 was generated to visualize the degree of overlap in IFN-related genes whose expression was induced by at 239 least one of the three viruses (Figure 4) . PR8 induced expression of the greatest number of IFN-related genes, 240 a majority of which were shared by at least one other virus. RV up-regulated slightly fewer IFN-induced 241 genes compared to PR8 and MHV infection resulted in up-regulation of the fewest IFN-induced genes. It was 242 somewhat surprising that PR8 induced a higher type I IFN response than RV, given that RV induced 243 expression of nearly twice as many genes than PR8 (Figure 2 ).