Transneuronal Circuit Tracing with Neurotropic Viruses

By Edward M. Callaway. 2008

253 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Because neurotropic viruses naturally traverse neural pathways, they are extremely valuable for elucidating neural circuits. Naturally occurring herpes and rabies viruses have been used for transneuronal circuit tracing for decades. Depending on the type of virus and strain, virus can travel preferentially in the anterograde or the retrograde direction. More recently, genetic modifications have allowed for many improvements. These include: reduced pathogenicity; addition of marker genes; control of synaptic spread; pseudotyping for infection of selected cells; addition of ancillary genetic elements for combining circuit tracing with manipulation of activity or functional assays. These modifications, along with the likelihood of future developments, suggest that neurotropic viruses will be increasingly important and effective tools for future studies of neural circuits.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Epidemiology

1. Guo-li Ming
2. Feng Zhang
3. Hongjun Song
4. I. Goshen

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

1. Guo-li Ming
2. Hongjun Song

Citations in the corpus

• Adult Neurogenesis in the Mammalian Brain: Significant Answers and Significant Questions (2011, background): “New technologies, such as optogenetics (reviewed by Zhang et al., 2010), transneuronal tracers (reviewed by Callaway, 2008), and in vivo imaging, will help to address these questions.”
• Intracerebral inoculation of pathological α-synuclein initiates a rapidly progressive neurodegenerative α-synucleinopathy in mice (2012, background): “…mechanism has pre viously been proposed for transmission in both prion disease (Scott et al., 1992; Prinz et al., 2003) and CNS viral infection (Callaway, 2008) in neurons, additional studies examining the anatomical relationships between injection sites and affected areas will assist in…”
• Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry. (2015, background): “Although labeling with retrograde and anterograde tracers and trans-synaptic viral vectors, imaging with array tomography, and saturated reconstruction with electron microscopy have made it possible to begin mapping preand postsynaptic neurons for individual neocortical neurons (Boyd and Matsubara, ”
• Molecular and cellular approaches for diversifying and extending optogenetics. (2010, background): “It is important to be aware that direct transduction of axon terminals with certain viruses can be achieved for targeting (reviewed in Callaway, 2008), and indeed virtually all viruses (including AAVs) carry some degree of this capability in a serotype- and circuit-dependent manner, as we and…”
• Neuronal Projections from V1 to V2 in Amblyopia (2012, unknown): “In the future, retrograde viral tracers that cross several synapses may facilitate the examination of wiring abnormalities in amblyopia (DeFalco et al., 2001; Campbell and Herbison, 2007; Callaway, 2008).”
• Whole-brain mapping of direct inputs to midbrain dopamine neurons. (2012, unknown): “Nevertheless, although future experiments need to validate the method further, our results together with existing literature (Callaway, 2008; Ugolini, 2011) support the utility of rabies virus-mediated transsynaptic tracing.”