Type B Coxsackieviruses and Their Interactions with the Innate and Adaptive Immune Systems

Abstract

Coxsackieviruses are important human pathogens, and their interactions with the innate and adaptive immune systems are of particular interest. Many viruses evade some aspects of the innate response, but coxsackieviruses go a step further by actively inducing, and then exploiting, some features of the host cell response. Furthermore, while most viruses encode proteins that hinder the effector functions of adaptive immunity, coxsackieviruses and their cousins demonstrate a unique capacity to almost completely evade the attention of naive CD8⁺ T cells. In this article, we discuss the above phenomena, describe the current status of research in the field, and present several testable hypotheses regarding possible links between virus infection, innate immune sensing and disease.

Keywords:

• adaptive immunity
• autophagy
• coxsackievirus
• innate immunity
• loop pathogenesis
• mitochondria
• picornavirus
• RIG-I-like receptor
• T cell
• Toll-like receptor

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Annette Lord for excellent secretarial support, and to Dr Malcolm R Wood for electron microscopy analyses.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

This work was supported by the following NIH grants: R01 AI042314 and HL093177 (J Lindsay Whitton); and F32 AI078660 (Christopher C Kemball). This is manuscript number 20599 from the Scripps Research Institute. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the following NIH grants: R01 AI042314 and HL093177 (J Lindsay Whitton); and F32 AI078660 (Christopher C Kemball). This is manuscript number 20599 from the Scripps Research Institute. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.