Background

The introduction of viral transneuronal tracers in the toolbox of neural tract-tracing methods has been an important addition in the field of connectomics for deciphering circuit-level architecture of the nervous system. One of the added values of viral compared to conventional retrograde tracers, in particular of rabies virus, is to provide a Golgi staining-like view of the infected neurons, revealing the thin dendritic arborizations and the spines that are major post-synaptic seats of neuronal connections.

Newmethod

Here, we comparatively illustrate the characteristics of the labeling obtained in the same model system, the basal ganglia circuitry, by different retrograde viral tracing approaches, using the Bartha strain of pseudorabies virus, the SAD and CVS strains of rabies virus and by the conventional retrograde tracer cholera toxin B. To best contrast the differences in the capacity of these tracers to reveal the dendritic morphology in details, we focused on one population of first-order infected neurons in the striatum, which exhibit high spine density, after tracer injection in the substantia nigra.

Results and conclusion

None of the viruses tested allowed to detect as many neurons as with cholera toxin B, but the SAD and CVS strains of rabies virus had the advantage of enabling detailed Golgi-like visualisation of the dendritic trees, the best numerical detection being offered by the transneuronal rCVS-N2c-P-mCherry while poor labeling was provided by rCVS-N2c-M-GFP. Results also suggest that, besides different viral properties, technical issues about constructs and detection methods contribute to apparently different efficiencies among the viral approaches.

中文翻译：

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使用狂犬病病毒对脑回路进行高尔基染色式逆行标记：将注意力集中在纹状体神经元上。

背景

在神经道追踪方法的工具箱中引入病毒跨神经示踪剂，已成为连接组学领域破译神经系统电路级结构的重要补充。与常规逆行示踪剂（尤其是狂犬病病毒）相比，病毒的附加价值之一是提供被感染神经元的高尔基染色样观察，揭示出薄的树突状乔木和棘突是神经元突触后主要的位点连接。

新方法

在这里，我们比较地说明了在相同的模型系统，基底神经节回路中，通过不同的逆向病毒追踪方法，使用伪狂犬病病毒的Bartha株，狂犬病病毒的SAD和CVS株以及常规逆行获得的标记的特征。示踪剂霍乱毒素B。为了更好地对比这些示踪剂在显示树突形态方面的能力差异，我们重点研究了在示踪剂注射后纹状体中的一族一级感染神经元，这些神经元显示出高的脊柱密度。黑质。

结果与结论

所测试的病毒均无法检测出霍乱毒素B所能检测到的神经元，但狂犬病病毒的SAD和CVS菌株具有能够对树突状树进行详细的高尔基样可视化的优点，而跨神经元能提供最佳的数值检测rCVS-N2c-P-mCherry，而rCVS-N2c-M-GFP标记较差。结果还表明，除了不同的病毒特性外，有关构建体和检测方法的技术问题还导致明显不同的病毒方法效率。