Abstract
The mammalian retina, brain, spinal cord, and peripheral ganglia are all heterogeneous tissues. Each is composed of neuronal and glial cell partners embedded in a connective tissue bed and supplied by vascular and immune cells. This complicated structure presents many challenges to neuroscientists and cell biologists, e.g., how to carry out a quantitative study of neurons in a mature animal surrounded by the hormonal and immune stimuli. A reductionist view leads investigators to study single neurons in vitro, subtracting the immune and vascular components and simplifying the problem. While this has advantages, it limits relevance of the study. We present a method for studying the axonal transport of Herpes simplex virus in mature neurons in situ. Using genetically identical mice and carefully controlling the delivery of virus, an investigator can obtain insight into the transport of virus to and from the neuron cell body within the cellular environment of an intact animal.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the artist, Ms. Suling Wang and Dr. Judy Garner at USC for their help in developing the procedure. This work was supported by PHS grants EY008773, EY019159 and EY002162 and by funds from That Man May See, San Francisco, CA and by an unrestricted grant from Research to Prevent Blindness.
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Draper, J.M., Stephenson, G.S., LaVail, J.H. (2014). In Vivo HSV-1 DNA Transport Studies Using Murine Retinal Ganglion Cells. In: Diefenbach, R., Fraefel, C. (eds) Herpes Simplex Virus. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1144. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0428-0_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0428-0_19
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