Clathrin-independent endocytosis includes the caveolae pathway which is dependent on caveolin, lipid-rafts and cholesterol [1, 2] . Cargoes internalised by caveolae are delivered to neutral pH caveosomes [8, 9] . From caveosomes, cargoes can traffic to the ER or Golgi [10, 11, 12] . Like CME, caveolae-mediated uptake requires dynamin and can be inhibited by expression of dominant-negative (DN) mutants of dynamin-2 [10, 12] . A number of viruses use caveolae for infection [10, 13, 14, 15, 16] and much of our knowledge of caveolae comes from studies with simian virus-40 [10, 17, 18] . A number of caveolin-independent pathways also originate from lipid-rafts, and novel clathrin-and raft-independent processes have also been identified. These pathways have different requirements for cellular proteins such as dynamin, flotillin, small GTPases, and for cholesterol and other specific lipids [1, 2, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25] , and can also be exploited by viruses for infection [21, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31] .