Fig. 4.

Analysis of serum viremia, virus load, cytokine production and vascular leakage in the small intestines of nIC-inoculated AG129 mice. Groups of mice (n=3) corresponding to each of the experimental groups described in Fig. 3 were set up in parallel and euthanised on day 4 post-nIC inoculation for serum viremia determination (panel ’a’), determination of virus load (panel ‘b’), TNF-α (panel ‘c’) and IL 6 (panel ‘d’) production and vascular leakage (quantitative analysis in panel ‘e’; qualitative analysis in panel ‘f-k’) in the small intestines. Vascular leakage was quantified by measuring the amount of Evan's blue extravasation into the small intestines by spectrophotometry. Vascular leakage is expressed as fold change in small intestinal dye content with reference to that in the ‘Untreated’ mice, taken as 1.0. The single and double asterisks (panels ‘a-e’; in all cases, the test groups are compared to the ‘Virus Control’ group) denote statistically significant and very significant differences, respectively, with reference to the virus control group (using the two-way ANOVA test with Bonferroni correction). In all other nIC groups, differences with reference to the cognate virus control group were not significant. The percent neutralisation of the challenge virus is indicated as 0 (panel ‘g’), 30 or 100 (panels ‘h-k’) (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article).