IFIT1 and viral infectious disease: IFIT inhibits viral infections through multiple mechanisms; IFIT1 and IFIT2 suppress the translation initiation (Hui et al., 2003), IFIT1 binds uncapped or incompletely capped viral RNA (Pichlmair et al., 2011) and sequesters viral protein (e.g., HPV E1) or RNA in the cytoplasm (Terenzi et al., 2008).