Soumya Chatterjee, Heather A Sullivan, Bryan J MacLennan, Ran Xu, YuanYuan Hou, Thomas K Lavin, Nicholas E Lea, Jacob E Michalski, Kelsey R Babcock, Stephan Dietrich, Gillian A Matthews, Anna Beyeler, Gwendolyn G Calhoon, Gordon Glober, Jennifer D Whitesell, Shenqin Yao, Ali Cetin, Julie A Harris, Hongkui Zeng, Kay M Tye, R Clay Reid, Ian R Wickersham
Recombinant rabies viral vectors have proven useful for applications including retrograde targeting of projection neurons and monosynaptic tracing, but their cytotoxicity has limited their use to short-term experiments. Here we introduce a new class of double-deletion-mutant rabies viral vectors that left transduced cells alive and healthy indefinitely. Deletion of the viral polymerase gene abolished cytotoxicity and reduced transgene expression to trace levels but left vectors still able to retrogradely infect projection neurons and express recombinases, allowing downstream expression of other transgene products such as fluorophores and calcium indicators...
April 2018: Nature Neuroscience