observation). and pinniped morbilliviruses were first recognized in 1988 following a series of epidemics in Northwestern Europe. A symposium in Hannover, Germany, in 1994 reviewed these events and the cross-disciplinary research conducted in several countries and laboratories worldwide at that time [14,15]. Twenty years later in August 2014, a Research and Policy for Infectious Disease Dynamics (RAPIDD) workshop was convened at Princeton University, USA, to discuss the disease outbreaks and findings since then, and identify future directions for research. As a product of that workshop, here we review the antigenic, molecular, pathological and epidemiological characteristics of CeMV worldwide and discuss topics for further research. 2. Antigenic and Molecular Characteristics of CeMV Morbilliviruses are unsegmented, linear negative-sense, single-stranded RNA viruses. The DMV genome is usually 15,702 nucleotides long and consists of six transcription units that encode six structural proteins, the nucleocapsid protein (N), phosphoprotein (P), matrix protein (M), fusion glycoprotein (F), haemagglutinin glycoprotein (H) and the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (L), as well as two virulence factor proteins (C and V) [9,16,17,18,19,20]. PMV and DMV are antigenically closely related, showing a similar reaction pattern with monoclonal antibodies (MoAb) raised against CDV, phocine distemper virus (PDV), peste des petits ruminants (PPRV) and rinderpest Xanthotoxol (RPV) proteins [21,22]. Serological surveys performed in cetaceans from the US and Europe showed that mean antibody titers were consistently similar to both DMV and PMV [22,23,24,25,26]. PMV and DMV are antigenically more closely related to the ruminant morbilliviruses and measles virus (MV) than to the distemper viruses [15]. Sequencing of the P, N, F Xanthotoxol and M genes further demonstrated and confirmed that PMV and DMV are closely related and that they form a separate group within the genus, closer to the ruminant viruses and MV than to the CDV/PDV group (Physique 2) [9,16,17,18,20,27]. There is a higher (18.3%) divergence between PMV and DMV at the level of the C-terminal end of the N gene, a hypervariable domain name, than between different MV isolates [17,18,28]. However, in other F and N gene regions there are fewer differences between Gata3 these strains than between strains of CDV [18,20]. Thus, the present consensus is usually that PMV and DMV represent two strains of CeMV [16,18,20,29]. Analyses of partial P and N gene sequences of a morbillivirus (PWMV) recovered in a long-finned pilot whale (PWMV and further confirmed a distinct strain circulating among pilot whale species [30]. However, pilot Xanthotoxol whales are also susceptible to contamination by DMV [27,31]. and that died along the coasts of Spain during the 2006C2008 Mediterranean epidemic were both infected by DMV strains that showed 100% identity across the H gene [27] and 99.9% identity over 9050 bp [31]. Similarly, P gene fragments of isolates recovered from and stranded along the Mediterranean coast of France in 2007C2008 were 100% identical to the Spanish isolate [32]. Altogether these results indicated that this same DMV strain circulated in the Mediterranean Sea and infected different cetacean species during the 2006C2008 outbreak. Furthermore, sequences of DMV strains recovered from Mediterranean cetaceans during the 2006C2008 epidemic and from washed ashore in the Canary Islands in 2002C2011 were highly conserved across the short genome region characterized (Physique 2) [33]. However, there was only 99.4% and 99.3% identity between the isolates form the 1990C92 epidemic and those from the 2006C2008 events based on the nearly complete genomes (9050 bp) [19,31]. Thus, these data suggest that the 1990C1992 strain was not maintained in the Mediterranean Sea between the epidemics, and that.