Professional Faculty Research

Virus assembly occurs in the complex environment of the cell and is dependent upon viral and cellular components being properly correlated in time and space. Our goal is to use newly developed methods in electron microscope tomography to reconstruct three-dimensional images of cells to determine the spatial position of these components in the cell at molecular resolution.  From these three-dimensional images we are able to visualize the virus particles during virus entry, viral genome packaging and virus assembly, which is allowing us to address many outstanding questions in virology.