The cover of the August 2013 issue of the Journal of Virology shows a high-resolution 3D image of the cytoplasmic compartments of tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) obtained by electron tomography through a collaborative effort between the group of Molecular Virology lead by Alessandro Marcello at the ICGEB in Trieste and Ralf Bartenschlager in Heidelberg. The full article in the same journal describes how the virus modifies intracellular membranes to create a protective environment for its own replication. 'Seeing is believing' says A. Marcello 'only by providing high definition imaging of viral infections we can fully understand the life cycle of pathogenic viruses'.

Lisa Miorin, the ICGEB doctoral student who performed the work started by developing a novel technique pioneered in Trieste to track viral genomes in living cells. She observed that following infection the viral replicated RNA was progressively immobilized within perinuclear compartments that protected viral replication from the host cellular innate antiviral response. However, in order to analyze these structures in more detail, she moved to Heidelberg, thanks to a short-term EMBO Fellowship, where she could get access to advanced electron tomography techniques. There she could show that these compartments were composed of small vesicles, where the viral RNA is replicated, and larger compartments, where the replicated RNA is triaged for further rounds of translation/replication or assembly. After completing this work and discussing her doctoral thesis at the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia, Lisa moved to New York as a postdoc in the group of Adolfo Garcia Sastre at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine where she still remained interested in the host response to viral infections.

Such success stories of its doctoral students highlight the ICGEB PhD Program restless effort to select highly motivated candidates and to provide them with a dynamic and international environment where they can grow to become fully independent scientists.