Transverse sinus injections drive robust whole-brain expression of transgenes
Abstract
Convenient, efficient and fast whole-brain delivery of transgenes presents a persistent experimental challenge in neuroscience. Recent advances demonstrate whole-brain gene delivery by retro-orbital injection of virus, but slow and sparse expression and the large injection volumes required make this approach cumbersome, especially for developmental studies. We developed a novel method for efficient gene delivery across the central nervous system in neonatal mice and rats starting as early as P1 and persisting into adulthood. The method employs transverse sinus injections of 2-4μL of AAV9 at P0. Here, we describe how to use this method to label and/or genetically manipulate cells in the neonatal rat and mouse brain. The protocol is fast, simple, can be readily adopted by any laboratory, and utilizes the widely available AAV9 capsid. The procedure is adaptable for diverse experimental applications ranging from biochemistry, anatomical and functional mapping, gene expression, silencing, and editing.
Data availability
Source data files have been provided for Figure 1, Figure 4, and Figure 5
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (1F32EY028869 - 01A1)
- Ali S Hamodi
National Institutes of Health (R01 EY015788,R01 EY023105,U01 NS094358,P30 EY026878,R01 MH111424)
- Michael Crair
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Sacha B Nelson, Brandeis University, United States
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experimental procedures are in accordance with National Institutes of Health guidelines and approved by Yale Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUC) protocol (#2017-11141). Animals are treated in compliance with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Yale University School of Medicine. All surgery was performed under isoflurane anesthesia (>P4) or ice anesthesia (<P4)., and every effort made to minimize suffering.
Version history
- Received: November 15, 2019
- Accepted: May 18, 2020
- Accepted Manuscript published: May 18, 2020 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: June 2, 2020 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2020, Hamodi et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 8,395
- views
-
- 935
- downloads
-
- 17
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Computational and Systems Biology
- Developmental Biology
Organisms utilize gene regulatory networks (GRN) to make fate decisions, but the regulatory mechanisms of transcription factors (TF) in GRNs are exceedingly intricate. A longstanding question in this field is how these tangled interactions synergistically contribute to decision-making procedures. To comprehensively understand the role of regulatory logic in cell fate decisions, we constructed a logic-incorporated GRN model and examined its behavior under two distinct driving forces (noise-driven and signal-driven). Under the noise-driven mode, we distilled the relationship among fate bias, regulatory logic, and noise profile. Under the signal-driven mode, we bridged regulatory logic and progression-accuracy trade-off, and uncovered distinctive trajectories of reprogramming influenced by logic motifs. In differentiation, we characterized a special logic-dependent priming stage by the solution landscape. Finally, we applied our findings to decipher three biological instances: hematopoiesis, embryogenesis, and trans-differentiation. Orthogonal to the classical analysis of expression profile, we harnessed noise patterns to construct the GRN corresponding to fate transition. Our work presents a generalizable framework for top-down fate-decision studies and a practical approach to the taxonomy of cell fate decisions.
-
- Developmental Biology
- Evolutionary Biology
Despite rapid evolution across eutherian mammals, the X-linked MIR-506 family miRNAs are located in a region flanked by two highly conserved protein-coding genes (SLITRK2 and FMR1) on the X chromosome. Intriguingly, these miRNAs are predominantly expressed in the testis, suggesting a potential role in spermatogenesis and male fertility. Here, we report that the X-linked MIR-506 family miRNAs were derived from the MER91C DNA transposons. Selective inactivation of individual miRNAs or clusters caused no discernible defects, but simultaneous ablation of five clusters containing 19 members of the MIR-506 family led to reduced male fertility in mice. Despite normal sperm counts, motility, and morphology, the KO sperm were less competitive than wild-type sperm when subjected to a polyandrous mating scheme. Transcriptomic and bioinformatic analyses revealed that these X-linked MIR-506 family miRNAs, in addition to targeting a set of conserved genes, have more targets that are critical for spermatogenesis and embryonic development during evolution. Our data suggest that the MIR-506 family miRNAs function to enhance sperm competitiveness and reproductive fitness of the male by finetuning gene expression during spermatogenesis.