"Self-inactivating" rabies viruses are susceptible to loss of their intended attenuating modification.

ABSTRACT: Monosynaptic tracing using rabies virus is an important technique in neuroscience, allowing brain-wide labeling of neurons directly presynaptic to a targeted neuronal population. A 2017 article reported the development of a noncytotoxic version-a major advance-based on attenuating the rabies virus by the addition of a destabilization domain to the C terminus of a viral protein. However, this modification did not appear to hinder the ability of the virus to spread between neurons. We analyzed two viruses provided by the authors and show here that both were mutants that had lost the intended modification, explaining the paper's paradoxical results. We then made a virus that actually did have the intended modification in at least the majority of virions and found that it did not spread effici

SUBMITTER: Jin L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9963760 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature