Fig. 3: Tissue tropism in ferrets intranasally inoculated with bovine H5N1 virus.
From: Pathogenicity and transmissibility of bovine H5N1 influenza virus
Ferrets (4–6 months old, n = 8 biologically independent animals per virus) were deeply anaesthetized and intranasally inoculated with 106 PFU of A/dairy cattle/New Mexico/A240920343-93/2024 (H5N1; ‘Cow-H5N1’) or A/Vietnam/1203/2004 (H5N1; ‘VN1203-H5N1’) in 500 μl of PBS. At 3 and 6 days postinfection, four ferrets infected with Cow-H5N1 were euthanized and tissues were collected for plaque assays in MDCK cells. For VN1203-H5N1 infections, four ferrets were euthanized at the day 3 timepoint, one ferret succumbed to its infection on day 4, one succumbed on day 5 and two others were euthanized at the day 6 timepoint. Tissues from animals that succumbed on day 4 or day 5 postinfection are represented by triangles and squares, respectively. In the figure panels, the floating bars show the median titre for each tissue of each inoculation group and variability is represented by the range. For VN1203-H5N1-infected animals, medians and ranges are shown only for the day 3 timepoint because some animals in the day 6 timepoint group succumbed earlier. When virus was not detected in a tissue, an arbitrary value below the limit of detection was assigned to enable visualization of the datapoint on the graph.
