Murine coronavirus neuropathogenesis: determinants of virulence

Cowley, Timothy J.; Weiss, Susan R.

Murine coronavirus, mouse hepatitis virus (MHV), causes various diseases depending on the strain and route of inoculation. Both the JHM and A59 strains, when inoculated intracranially or intranasally, are neurovirulent. Comparison of the highly virulent JHM isolate, JHM.SD, with less virulent JHM isolates and with A59 has been used to determine the mechanisms and genes responsible for high neuropathogenicity of MHV. The focus of this review is on the contributions of viral spread, replication and innate and adaptive immunity to MHV neuropathogenesis. JHM.SD spreads more quickly among neurons than less neurovirulent MHVs, and is able to spread in the absence of the canonical MHV receptor, CEACAM1a. The observation that JHM.SD infects more cells and expresses more antigen, but produces less infectious virus per cell than A59 implies that efficient replication is not always a correlate of high neurovirulence. This is likely due to the unstable nature of the JHM.SD spike protein (S). JHM.SD induces a generally protective innate immune response; however, the strong neutrophil response may be more pathogenic than protective. In addition JHM.SD induces only a minimal T cell response, while the strong T cell response and the concomitant IFNγ induced by the less neurovirulent A59 is protective. Differences in the S and nucleocapsid (N) proteins between A59 and JHM.SD contribute to JHM.SD neuropathogenicity. The hemmagglutinin-esterase (HE) protein may enhance neuropathogenicity of some MHV isolates, but is unlikely a major contributor to the high neuroviruence of JHM.SD. Further data suggests that neither the internal (I) protein, nor nonstructural proteins ns4, and ns2 are significant contributors to neurovirulence.