Hepatic cytochrome P450 and related drug biotransformation during an outbreak of mouse hepatitis virus in a colony of Swiss BALB/c mice

Mouse hepatitis is a common highly infectious virus of the Coronaviridae family that commonly infects laboratory colonies of BALB/c mice. In a natural outbreak of this disease in our institution we demonstrated that mouse hepatitis virus appears to have little or no effect on the levels of cytochrome P450 or on the activities of ethoxyresorufin O-dealkylase and benzyloxy resorufin O-dealkylase in hepatic microsomes. Antibody titers for the virus were elevated in all mice tested and were negative in a control uninfected group. In a number of studies carried out over a period of months during the active outbreak we did not observe lower levels of cytochrome P450 in comparison with infectious free periods. Although the activation of host defence mechanisms and infections are well known to diminish the cytochrome P450 enzyme system in the liver, these results indicate that during a period of confirmed active infection with mouse hepatitis virus there was no evidence of an impairment in drug biotransformation enzymes.