Vaccinia uses and abuses the microtubule cytoskeleton or in vitro association with microtubules are the N protein from murine coronavirus (Kalicharran and Dales, 1996) , the movement protein from tobamovirus (Heinlein et al., 1995) , the aphid transmission factor from cauli¯ower mosaic virus (Blanc et al., 1996) , the UL25 protein from pseudorabies virus (Kaelin et al., 2000) , the VP4 spike protein from rotavirus (Nejmeddine et al., 2000) and the M protein of vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) (Melki et al., 1994) . The identi®cation of A10L and L4R, two viral core proteins, as MAP-like proteins was, however, unexpected given their previously characterized role in viral morphogenesis (Vanslyke and Hruby, 1994) . The interaction of A10L and L4R with microtubules in vivo, together with the in vitro microtubule-binding data, suggest a potential mechanism for the association of viral cores with microtubules. One could envisage that viral cores which are released into the cytoplasm at the beginning of infection (Ichihashi, 1996; Vanderpasschen et al., 1998; Pedersen et al., 2000) bind directly to microtubules in a manner analogous to adenovirus or HSV-1 nucleocapsids. Further work is required to determine whether incoming cores do in fact move towards the MTOC by the dynein± dynactin complex and/or use the complex for anchoring on microtubules.