Dr. Jeremy Rossman, Lecturer in Virology, comments on an article he and his collaborators published recently. The publication was selected by the Journal of Virology as the cover article. Dr. Rossman teaches Virology as a final year module within our degree programmes.
“Influenza viruses are pleiomorphic, forming both spherical and filamentous virions. The spherical viruses are known to enter cells via clathrin-mediated endocytosis; however, we now show that the larger filamentous viruses enter cells through the induction of macropinocytosis. This is the first example of different morphological variants of the same virus utilizing different entry pathways to infect the same cell type.”