Although only a few blood cells are infected during measles, this infectious disease is followed by acute immunosuppression, associated with high infant mortality. Measles virus nucleoprotein has been suggested to contribute to virus-induced inhibition of the immune response. However, it has been difficult to understand how this cytosolic viral protein could leave an infected cell and then perturb the immune response. Here we demonstrate that intracellularly synthesized nucleoprotein enters the late endocytic compartment, where it recruits its cellular ligand, the Fc␥ receptor. Nucleoprotein is then expressed at the surfaces of infected leukocytes associated with the Fc␥ receptor and is secreted into the extracellular compartment, allowing its interaction with uninfected cells. Finally, cell-derived nucleoprotein inhibits the secretion of interleukin-12 and the generation of the inflammatory reaction, both shown to be impaired during measles. These results reveal nucleoprotein egress from infected cells as a novel strategy in measles-induced immunosuppression.Measles virus (MV) is among the most contagious pathogens for humans, still infecting more than 40 million people and causing the death of around 1 million a year (33). MV is responsible for an acute childhood disease which is widespread in developing countries, with sporadic outbreaks in industrialized countries despite vaccination. MV is a morbillivirus with a single-stranded, negative-sense RNA genome, encoding six structural proteins. The lipid bilayer contains two envelope glycoproteins, the hemagglutinin (H) and the fusion protein (F). The matrix protein (M) supplies an interface between the envelope and the virion core, composed of viral RNA, the nucleocapsid protein (N), the phosphoprotein (P), and the large protein (L). The function of the N protein appears to be packaging and protection of the viral genomic nucleic acid and formation of a replication complex, along with the P and L proteins (20). N is the most abundant of the viral proteins, synthesized on free ribosomes and folded in the cytoplasm, where it binds viral RNA and forms intracellular inclusions (17). This 60-kDa protein has the capacity to self-assemble into nucleocapsids on cellular RNA as well, in the absence of any of the other MV gene products (43). MV infection is initiated by the attachment of the virus via MV H to one of its specific receptors, CD46 or CD150, followed by virus-cell fusion and release of the nucleocapsid into the cytoplasm (20,46).MV causes a profound suppression of the immune system that permits opportunistic infections, leading to high infant morbidity and mortality. The immune abnormalities that are most evident are in the cellular arm of the immune response and include disappearance of the delayed-type hypersensitivity responses (45, 49), impaired proliferation of peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBLs) (23), and allospecific cytotoxicity (15). Type 2 polarization of cytokine responses occurs during late stages of measles: the production of interleukin 4 (IL-4)...