Frontiers in Bioscience-Landmark (FBL) is published by IMR Press from Volume 26 Issue 5 (2021). Previous articles were published by another publisher on a subscription basis, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Frontiers in Bioscience.
In the past several years, many viral gene products have been found to encode proteins which interfere with immune defense mechanisms. Whether these interactions between virus and immune system components are actually evasion mechanisms used during viral infections in their natural hosts remains to be proven. In vitro studies do, however, reveal several tactics which may aid viral replication and dissemination by interfering with components of both the innate and adaptive immune systems. In this manuscript, we discuss the more intensively studied of these putative in vitro evasion tactics and ponder their relevance in in vivo situations.