Identification of the epithelial receptor for measles virus

Measles (MV) is an aerosol-transmitted virus that affects more than 10 million children each year and accounts for approximately 120,000 deaths. While it was long believed to replicate in the respiratory epithelium before disseminating, it was recently shown to initially infect macrophages and dendritic cells of the airways using the signaling lymphocytic activation molecule (SLAM, CD150) as receptor. These cells then cross the respiratory epithelium and ferry the infection to lymphatic organs where MV replicates vigorously. How and where the virus crosses back into the airways has remained unknown. However, certain carcinoma cell lines have been described to be either permissive for wt MV infection, or not (Leonard VHJ et al. 2008). Therefor, we decided to compare the expression pattern of permissive and non-permissive cell lines by micro array analysis. Based on functional analyses of surface proteins preferentially expressed on virus-permissive epithelial cell lines, we identified nectin-4 (poliovirus-receptor-like-4) as a candidate receptor.