As obligate intracellular parasites, viruses rely entirely on their host for the synthesis of molecular building blocks required for replication. Because of their small size and limited coding landscape, viruses are unable to accommodate the molecular machineries necessary to translate and fold their proteins. To circumvent this limitation viruses instead pirate the host cell components in charge of these tasks. Many years of investigations by us and others have revealed the complex strategies viruses employ to control their hosts, however many questions remain: (1) How do viruses precisely manipulate the cellular factors involved in translation? (2) How do they exploit and remodel the pathways that oversee and control protein folding? and (3) What are the functions of newly discovered viral coding elements? We seek to answer these fundamental questions by systematically probing virus-host interactions at the molecular level. To this end, we employ traditional cell and molecular biology techniques, as well as systems-level methods, including ribosome profiling and CRISPR-based genetic screens.