News RX, July 17, 2007 Reports from the United States and Belgium highlight recent research in virology. According to recent research from the United States, "Alphaviruses are arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) that include a number of important human and animal pathogens. Their replication proceeds in the cytoplasm of infected cells and does not directly depend on nuclei. "We have developed a set of recombinant Sindbis (SIN) viruses with green fluorescent protein (GFP) insertions in one of the nonstructural proteins, nsP3, to further understand the RCs' genesis and structure," said Elena Frolova and colleagues at the University Texas Medical Branch. "We studied the assembly of nsP3/GFP-containing protein complexes at different stages of infection and isolated a combination of cellular proteins that are associated with SIN nsP3." They reported, "We demonstrated the following: SIN nsP3 can tolerate the insertion of GFP into different fragments of the coding sequence; the designed recombinant viruses are viable, and their replication leads to the assembly of nsP3/GFP chimeric proteins into gradually developing, higher-order structures differently organized at early and late times post-infection; at late times post-infection, nsP3 is assembled into complexes of similar sizes, which appear to be bound to cytoskeleton filaments and can aggregate into larger structures Frolova and her coauthors published their study in the Journal of Virology (Formation of nsP3-specific protein complexes during Sindbis virus replication. J Virol, 2006;80(8):4122-4134).