Interestingly, treatment of astrocytes with Baf, which is an inhibitor of late stages of autophagy, resulted in significantly altered parameters of flavivirus infections; it reduced the amounts of TBEV and WNV RNA in the cell culture supernatant, completely abolished and strongly inhibited the astrocyte-mediated production of infectious TBEV and WNV, respectively, and decreased the rate of infection of cultured human astrocytes. Here, BANF1 is linked to infection.