Physical principles and models describing intracellular virus particle dynamics

Modeling in cellular biology benefits greatly from quantitative analysis that arise from the theory of diffusion and chemical reactions. Recent progress in single particle imaging enables the visualization of viral trajectories evolving in the cytoplasm. Biophysical models and mathematical analysis have been developed to unravel the complexity of single viral trajectories. We review here models of active motion of viruses along the cytoskeleton as well as their diffusion. We present resent efforts to estimate global trafficking properties, such as the probability and the mean time for a viral particle to reach a small nuclear pore. However, most signaling pathways involved in controlling viral motion remain undescribed and should be the goal of future modeling efforts.