Third-generation rabies viral vectors allow nontoxic retrograde targeting of projection neurons with greatly increased efficiency.

Cell reports methods
Authors
Keywords
Abstract

Rabies viral vectors have become important components of the systems neuroscience toolkit, allowing both direct retrograde targeting of projection neurons and monosynaptic tracing of inputs to defined postsynaptic populations, but the rapid cytotoxicity of first-generation (ΔG) vectors limits their use to short-term experiments. We recently introduced second-generation, double-deletion-mutant (ΔGL) rabies viral vectors, showing that they efficiently retrogradely infect projection neurons and express recombinases effectively but with little to no detectable toxicity; more recently, we have shown that ΔGL viruses can be used for monosynaptic tracing with far lower cytotoxicity than the first-generation system. Here, we introduce third-generation (ΔL) rabies viral vectors, which appear to be as nontoxic as second-generation ones but have the major advantage of growing to much higher titers, resulting in significantly increased numbers of retrogradely labeled neurons in vivo.

Year of Publication
2023
Journal
Cell reports methods
Volume
3
Issue
11
Pages
100644
Date Published
11/2023
ISSN
2667-2375
DOI
10.1016/j.crmeth.2023.100644
PubMed ID
37989085
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