Reevaluating the impact of epstein-barr virus noncoding rnas on the interferon response

Abstract

The necessity of viruses to modulate the innate immune response often dictates the outcome of viral infection. As such, viruses encode many factors that undermine these potent antiviral responses. A recent study by Bouvet et al. (M. Bouvet, S. Voigt, T. Tagawa, M. Albanese, et al., mBio 12:e03440-20, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.03440-20) revisits the impact of virus-encoded noncoding RNAs on key components of the interferon pathway and sheds light on how the extensive biological functions of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) microRNAs (miRNAs) are on targeting both the induction and signaling cascades of interferon.