Responses and Recovery from Friend Retrovirus Infection

Murine norovirus (MNV) is a highly infectious but generally nonpathogenic agent that is commonly found in research mouse colonies in both North America and Europe. In the present study, the effects of acute and chronic infections with MNV on immune responses and recovery from concurrent Friend virus (FV) infections were investigated. No significant differences in T-cell or NK-cell responses, FV-neutralizing antibody re-sponses, or long-term recovery from FV infection were observed. We conclude that concurrent MNV infections had no major impacts on FV infections. Murine noroviruses (MNV) are small single-stranded RNA viruses related to human noroviruses, which are the major cause of nonbacterial gastroenteritis in humans. Noroviruses are highly contagious and spread through the fecal-oral route. Although MNV generally does not cause overt clinical signs in immunocompetent mice, its high prevalence of 32 % in North American and European research colonies (15, 23) raises the concern that coinfection with MNV might significantly impact studies being done on other pathogens. In this regard, MN