McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA; Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Cell Rep Methods. 2023 Nov 20;3(11):100644. doi: 10.1016/j.crmeth.2023.100644.
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.
狂犬病病毒载体已成为系统神经科学工具包的重要组成部分,允许直接逆行靶向投射神经元,并对特定突触后群体的输入进行单突触追踪,但第一代(ΔG)载体的快速细胞毒性限制了它们在短期实验中的使用。我们最近引入了第二代,双缺失突变体(ΔGL)狂犬病病毒载体,表明它们能够有效地逆行感染投射神经元,并有效地表达重组酶,但几乎没有可检测到的毒性;最近,我们已经表明,ΔGL 病毒可用于单突触追踪,其细胞毒性比第一代系统低得多。在这里,我们引入了第三代(ΔL)狂犬病病毒载体,它们似乎与第二代一样无毒,但具有主要优势,即能够生长到更高的滴度,从而导致体内逆行标记神经元的数量显著增加。