Dry pasta may be hard and brittle, but cook it properly and you’ll get the soft and flexible “al dente” texture that professional chefs aim for. Viruses can change their structure in a similar way, becoming more or less flexible depending on what organism they are trying to infect. Douglas Fritz, a graduate student in the Intramural Research Program at the National Institutes of Health, is exploring how the dengue virus changes its structure based on its surroundings in the hopes that his