Adenoviral vectors (AdV) are attractive vectors for research applications and gene therapy: they can be produced at high titers, can accommodate large transgenes, transduce quiescent and dividing cells, and do not integrate into the host’s genome. The main challenge with using AdV is that it triggers a strong immune response after in vivo administration, which results in the death of transduced cells and loss of transgene expression (Interestingly, the strong immunogenicity of AdVs is what makes them ideal candidates for applications in oncolysis and vaccination!)

Why study neural connectivity?

One of the early lessons many of us learned in biology is that the body’s architecture and plumbing are important. We started with learning the head is connected to the neck. Shortly after, we learned about organs and the jobs they perform. This became foundational later on when we studied biological processes, like how our stem cells are housed in specific locations and give rise to progenitors during growth and development or that blood flows through the heart and lungs and oxygenates the body. However, in neuroscience, this architecture is frequently still an open question. The connections between neurons are what define how the brain operates, and thus, are a major part of the answer to many biological questions about the brain. To address this, molecular tools to map neuronal connectivity are widely used in neuroscience. In this post, I’ll describe how rabies virus (RABV) can be used in the brain to visualize how neurons are connected.

As part of our partnership with the Penn Vector Core, we will be expanding our inventory of tools for calcium sensing. In this post, we’ll review the main categories of sensors we’ll have available.

Guest blogger Todd Waldman, Professor at Georgetown University, contributed to this post.

Adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) make fantastic gene delivery vehicles for episomal gene expression and are particularly useful for gene delivery to the nervous system. For many years they have also been used to enhance the efficiency of genome editing. In this post we'll walk through a variety of ways you can use AAVs to improve your genome editing experiments (with and without targeted nucleases).

Many of us take comfort in the fact that it’s often not quantity, but quality that really matters. Well, it turns out this isn’t the case for using AAV. When it comes to infecting cells, titer, the amount of virus used, really does matter. (*psst*, quality definitely also matters).

Check out this post for a refresher on AAV titers