Feelings of delight associated with the brain’s reward circuits are generally linked to dopamine (DA), a well-known reward chemical and neurotransmitter. But aside from DA’s famous role as the “happy hormone,” it’s also involved in reinforcement learning, decision making, and motor control.
Topics: Viral Vectors
One of the biggest barriers to gene therapy treatment of central nervous system (CNS) diseases is the blood brain barrier (BBB). It’s the BBB’s job to block the entry of pathogens to the CNS, but this also stops viral vectors, such as adeno-associated virus (AAV), from reaching their targets.
Topics: Viral Vectors
Optogenetics, the use of light sensitive proteins (opsins) to manipulate cell activity, enables researchers to silence or incite neuronal firing and study subsequent effects on behavior. The system is an especially powerful tool for in vivo behavioral studies because it is non-invasive and offers a high degree of control over time and space.
Zebrafish have become a popular model organism because their larval stage lends itself well to studies of neuroscience. The larvae of zebrafish are translucent and allow for noninvasive live imaging with fluorescent tags and activation of light sensing proteins. Furthermore, during the first 2 weeks of life, larvae already exhibit distinct behaviors such as spontaneous swimming and escape reflex. These traits, coupled with short generation times and high fecundity, make zebrafish ideal for high throughput studies of optogenetics.
Topics: Viral Vectors
Since the beginning of our viral service in 2016, we’ve added many new tools to our inventory of ready-to-use viral vectors. Here are some of the AAV we have released in the last few months. You can also browse our entire AAV inventory.
Our new AAVs include:
Topics: Viral Vectors, Other Viral Vector Tools
Since rolling out our viral service in 2016, Addgene has shipped thousands of AAV and lentiviral preps to scientists around the world. In the years since, our scientists have optimized many steps in the viral production and quality control process to improve both the yield and quality of the viral preps. For example, last year we published an article describing a sucrose supplementation strategy to improve yield. In addition, as described in this blog post, the team developed a viral genome sequencing strategy to confirm the identity and purity of all AAV viral lots.
Topics: Viral Vectors
