Nikta Fay

If your survival depended on your ability to take over another organism, how would you hijack the organism's parts to do so? Viruses have evolved to overcome barriers such as membranes and viscous fluids to efficiently take over cells and replicate. Based on their structure and shape, the various types of viruses must have evolved to use different strategies for entering a cell, replicating their genome, and infecting another host. My study looks at one of the smallest viruses known, a parvovirus, Minute Virus of Mice (MVM), and how it alters the cellular skeleton (cytoskeleton) of its host in order to replicate and spread infection.