Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (VSV) for Neuronal Tracing

Vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) is a non-segmented, negative-strand RNA virus in the genus of Vesiculovirus of Rhabdoviridae family. The genome of VSV is approximately 11kb-12kb nucleotides which encodes nucleoprotein (N), phosphoprotein (P), matrixprotein (M), glycoprotein (G) and large polymerase protein (L). The modified VSV has been widely used as an anterograde tracer.
Glycoprotein (G) is an essential component for VSV to anterograde transsynaptic. When removed G (VSV-∆G), it will lose the ability to cross synapses, but still can express the foreign gene in high abundance. Therefore,VSV-∆G can be used to quickly obtain a complete image of the projection distribution of neurons, and can also be used for anterograde monosynaptic tracing.

Advantages
· Fast and high efficiency
· Strong background in neuronal tracing tool
· Hypotoxicity and strong signal
· The most competitive price

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Background

The neuronal connectivity by different synapses forms the brain's complex activities. So developing the technology to dissect the brain circuits became urgent in neuroscience to understand the brain functions. Currently, techniques for studying brain circuits include conventional tracers and recombinant viral vectors. The conventional tracers like CTB, HRP, PHA-L, BDAs and so on, but they have some disadvantages, such as:
1) Cell specificity cannot be achieved.
2) Efficiency is not stable.
3) The circuits of the neurons at multiple step of synaptic connections cannot be realized.

However, due to the ability to efficiently enter cells and deliver a variety of gene, genetically engineered recombinant viral vectors emerged as powerful tools for visualizing neural connectivity. The commonly used neurotropic virus, such as HSV (Herpes simplex virus type 1), VSV (Vesicular stomatitis virus), PRV (pseudorabies virus) and RABV (rabies virus) can cross synapse from one cell to another, if we provide the protein that used for replicate. In addition, there are also SFV (mark the fine morphology of in-situ neurons) and AAV viruses(as a helper virus to express exogenous genes or as a monosynaptic tracer with serotypes 1) that are used for neuronal tracing.