Many viruses are enclosed in an envelope - a membrane that is derived from the infected host cell during virus exit. To infect a new host cell, specialized membrane-fusion proteins on the virus envelope fuse it with a membrane of the host cell, delivering the viral genome into the cell. This fusion activity must be deployed at precisely the right time during virus entry, and must also be silenced during viral assembly and exit. In this issue, Li et aV and Voss et al. provide structural insights into the regulation of the membrane-fusion proteins of enveloped alphaviruses during the viruses' entry into and exit from the host cell.
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