Mathematical Biology Seminar Saveez Saffarian Wednesday October 5th, 2011 3:05pm in LCB 225 "Investigating Enveloped Virus Budding: one molecule at a time" Abstract: Dynamics of enveloped virus budding Enveloped viruses encompass a large family of human and animal pathogens. They include HIV, Influenza and rabies along with many other examples. In terms of first principles, an enveloped virus is a machine that has evolved to do two things: 1- Break the kinetic barrier on membrane vesicularization, thereby creating spherical 100nm vesicles from a flat membrane sheet. 2- Package all the components the virus needs for replication into the 100nm vesicle it has created. I will highlight the efforts in our lab to investigate the budding with a focus on the two mechanisms outlined above. We use Vesicular Stomatitis Virus and HIV gag as model systems and our main approach is to visualize the dynamics of the budding virus in live cells.