Mucin 4 Protects Female Mice from Coronavirus Pathogenesis

Jessica A. Plante; Kenneth S. Plante; Lisa E. Gralinski; Anne Beall; Martin T. Ferris; Daniel Bottomly; Richard Green; Shannon K. McWeeney; Mark T. Heise; Ralph S. Baric; Vineet D. Menachery

Next, the impact of Muc4 -/on SARS-CoV viral load was measured. Lung lobes from 96 male and female Muc4 -/and WT mice were harvested at two DPI, an acute timepoint previously 97 associated with high SARS-CoV titer (Sheahan et al., 2008) , and at four DPI, the timepoint at 98 which the QTL on chromosome 16 was mapped (Gralinski et al., 2015) . Surprisingly, despite 99 trends for higher mean viral loads in Muc4 -/mice on day 2 and day 4, virus titers were not 100 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https: //doi.org/10.1101 //doi.org/10. /2020 significantly different from WT mice at either timepoint (Fig. 3A) . Similarly, despite differences in 101 weight loss, viral titer in the lung also exhibited no sex effect (Table S3) . Given the distribution 102 of Muc4 in mucosal surfaces, viral load was further interrogated with IHC to determine whether 103