The dramatic rearrangement of the microtubule cytoskeleton which occurs during vaccinia infection is unlikely to be attributed exclusively to the action of A10L and L4R since they only associate with a subset of microtubules ( Figure 10) . Furthermore, the loss of microtubule organization precedes detectable association of A10L and L4R with microtubules, which occurs from~8 h post-infection. We therefore wondered whether vaccinia infection disrupts centrosome function, given the loss of microtubule aster con®guration during infection (Figure 7 ). Since microtubules are nucleated by the centrosome in animal cells, we examined whether vaccinia infection affects g-tubulin, which is critically required for this process (Stearns and Kirschner, 1994) . We observed that g-tubulin labelling of the centrosome is greatly reduced from as early as 2 h post-infection ( Figure 12 ). The same result was obtained when we infected PtK1 cells stably expressing green¯uorescent protein (GFP)-labelled g-tubulin (Khodjakov and Rieder, 1999) . In addition, the centrosomal and centriolar components pericentrin, C-Nap 1, Nek 2 and centrin are reduced by immuno¯uorescence in the centrosomes/centrioles of vaccinia-infected cells ( Figure 12) . Furthermore, the reduction of centrosomal markers requires viral protein synthesis as their levels are not affected when cells are infected in the presence of cycloheximide (data not shown).