The innate immune response to viral infection frequently includes induction of type I interferons (IFN),
Measles is a disease caused by measles virus (MeV) and remains a leading cause of childhood mortality, with approximately 164,000 deaths in 2008 (1). Infection is initiated in the respiratory tract and then spreads to the local lymph nodes and through the blood to cause systemic infection and a rash disease (2-6). MeV infection leads to weeks of immune suppression (7-9) that result in increased susceptibility to the secondary infections that are responsible for most measles-related deaths (10). Infection with a live-attenuated MeV vaccine induces protective immunity and does not result in clinically significant immune suppression (11-13).Dendritic cells (DCs) are among the earliest cells infected by MeV (2, 3) and play an important role as a link between innate and adaptive immune responses. DCs recognize pathogen-associated molecular patterns through cell surface and intracellular receptors, such as Toll-like receptors and RNA helicases (14), which can lead to activation of transcription factors and induction of cytokines, such as type I (alpha interferon [IFN-␣] and IFN-) and type III (IFN-) interferon (15). DCs also initiate the adaptive immune response by presenting antigen to T cells (16,17).IFNs are an important component of the innate response to virus infection and use primarily JAK-STAT signaling to induce IFN-stimulated genes (ISGs), such as myxovirus resistance gene (Mx) and ISG56, also known as IFIT1. ISGs include genes encoding proteins that inhibit viral replication (15), and viruses have developed many ways to counteract IFN signaling. Two nonstructural proteins of MeV, V and C, regulate the IFN pathway by blocking induction of type I IFN and inhibiting JAK-STAT signaling (18-27).Inhibition of IFN induction has been proposed as a possible contributor to the virulence and immune suppression of wildtype (WT) MeV (28), but studies of MeV induction of IFN have been conflicting. Some studies comparing IFN induction by vaccine and WT strains of MeV report that the vaccine virus induces higher levels of IFN than does the WT virus (29-31), while other studies do not see this difference (27,32,33). The sequences of the V and C protein genes are similar between vaccine and WT strains (23,34,35). In vivo studies have not detected IFN induction during measles (26,36), and in vitro studies have often been confounded by the presence of defective interfering (DI) RNA particles in virus stocks (31,32,35,37). DI RNAs are most frequently produced during virus replication when the multiplicity of infection (MOI) or the passage of the standard virus is high (38). The 5= copy-back form of DI RNA forms a hairpin RNA structure that is the prevalent form produced during paramyxovirus replication and is packaged similarly to the standard virus (39). DI RNA particles are postulated to interfere with the replication of the standard virus by competing for viral proteins in the infected cell (38). However, DI RNA particle...