The purpose of Core C is to provide support to the Projects and Core B for all high biocontainment work. The core brings unique expertise in molecular biology and cell biology of Ebola viruses. It also has high throughput assay capacity for measuring and quantitating virus infection efficiency that forms part of prioritization of host factors for follow up work in the other projects. The core will acquire, cultivate and characterize Ebola virus isolates that include those from the 2014 West Africa outbreak as well as make recombinant viruses containing amino acid changes that are produced from a reverse genetics system. The core will supply nucleic acids and cell lysates from viruses and infected cells. After host factors are identified and virus protein critical residues are known, from the Projects, each will be validated using cell lines infected with wild type and recombinant viruses. Animal work to evaluate pathogenesis will be performed using mouse models of disease. Each of these services supports key experiments performed in each Project ensuring that Core C will interact heavily with each part and be a key component of this Program Project.