Figure 1

Inhibition of H5 and H3 influenza A virus replication by CQ in MDCK cells. Cells were incubated with chloroquine (CQ) after virus inoculation or mock-infection and tested for cell viability and viral RNA copies at 24 h post-infection. A) Viability of cells infected with A/Chicken/Italy/9097/97 (H5N9) and treated with increasing concentrations of CQ as detected by colorimetric test. Assays were performed as described in the text. The dotted line indicates inhibition of uninfected cell viability, the solid line indicates inhibition of infected cell viability. Results are presented as the curves that best fit the data points. B) Results of one representative experiment showing inhibition by CQ of A/Chicken/Italy/9097/97 viral RNA production. Virus infected MDCK cells were incubated for one day in the presence of 0, 5, 10, 20 or 25 μM chloroquine. Cell supernatants were used for viral RNA extraction and subjected to a quantitative real-time RT-PCR (qRRT-PCR) assay. Oseltamivir (OS; 20 nM) was used as a positive control. C and D) as in A and B), respectively, using A/Panama/2007/99-like (H3N2) virus. In D) both results obtained with inocula containing 10⁴ and 10³ TCID₅₀/ml are reported. Results in B) and D) are displayed for purely representative reasons to show that there is inhibition of virus production, and cannot be compared with each other or with those in A) and C), due to the high intra- and inter-assay variability of the qRRT PCR assay (see Ref. [29]).