“…These discrepancies were likely due to differences in dosing, length of exposure, and, most importantly, the fact that speciesspecific IFN-α was variably used and rodents do not respond to human IFN-α with activation of classic type I IFN receptor signaling (Loftis et al, 2006a;Loftis et al, 2006b;Wang et al, 2008). Moreover, human IFN-α administered to rodents binds to opioid receptors, which may be responsible for some of the observed changes in brain monoamines (Blalock and Smith, 1981;Ho et al, 1992;Wang et al, 2006). Moreover, chronic (6 days to 4 weeks) peripheral administration of both human-and species-specific IFN-a administered to rodents has demonstrated only limited ability to reliably induce depressive behaviors (eg, see Rhesus monkeys exposed to chronic IFN-α exhibit immune, neuroendocrine, and behavioral responses similar to that of cytokine-treated patients, including decreases in psychomotor activity and increases in depressive-like huddling behavior (in~50% of animals; Felger et al, 2007;Felger and Miller, 2012).…”