In contrast with the significant stimulation of SOCS1 and SOCS3 mRNA transcripts in IC-21 mouse macrophages during productive SG-MCMV infection, UVi-MCMV resulted in only a small trend toward transient stimulation of SOCS1 and SOCS3 that did not reach statistical significance when compared with medium-treated control cells (Fig 3) and remained significantly lower than SG-MCMV values (SOCS1: p<0.05 for ≥2 hpi, and SOCS3: p<0.001 for 2 and 4 hpi, UVi-MCMV compared with SG-MCMV at each time point). Here, SOCS3 is linked to infection.