Great improvements have been made in understanding the role of B cells in EBV persistence in vivo due to the accessibility of infected primary B lymphocytes in the blood and lymph nodes, and the availability of an in vitro infection system. Although a variety of in vitro epithelial cell culture model for EBV infection have been explored, they may not closely represent the situation in nasopharynx. The failure to detect infected epithelial cells in vivo and the lack of an accurate in vitro nasopharyngeal epithelial culture model have severely hampered this kind of research. Here we propose to establish three in vitro models of EBV infection using primary nasopharyngeal epithelial cells. The proposed more precise ex vivo infection models in this study will enhance our understanding of EBV latent persistent infection, replication and their contribution to the pathogenesis of NPC.