The chemokine-binding protein encoded by the poxvirus orf virus inhibits recruitment of dendritic cells to sites of skin inflammation and migration to peripheral lymph nodes.

Orf virus (ORFV) is a zoonotic parapoxvirus that induces acute pustular skin lesions in sheep and humans. ORFV can reinfect its host and the discovery of several secreted immune modulatory factors that include a chemokine-binding protein (CBP) may explain this phenomenon. Dendritic cells (DC) are professional antigen presenting cells that induce adaptive immunity and their recruitment to sites of infection in skin and migration to peripheral lymph nodes is critically dependent on inflammatory and constitutive chemokine gradients respectively. Here we examined whether ORFV-CBP could disable these gradients using mouse models. Previously we established that ORFV-CBP bound murine inflammatory chemokines with high affinity and here we show that this binding spectrum extends to constitutive chemokines CCL19 and CCL21. Using cell-based chemotaxis assays, ORFV-CBP inhibited the movement of both immature and mature DC in response to these inflammatory and constitutive chemokines respectively. Moreover in C57BL/6 mice, intradermally injected CBP potently inhibited the recruitment of blood-derived DC to lipopolysaccharide-induced sites of skin inflammation and inhibited the migration of ex vivo CpG-activated DC to inguinal lymph nodes. Finally we showed that ORFV-CBP completely inhibited T responsiveness in the inguinal lymph nodes using intradermally injected DC pulsed with ovalbumin peptide and transfused transgenic T cells.