Expected to have broad impact, the new tool will be made available through the UCI Center for Virus Research where it can be disseminated to the entire neuroscience community.
"The development of trans-synaptic viral tracers is an important component of the BRAIN Initiative,” said Xu. “At present, the lack of viral-based anterograde, monosynaptic tracing tools with high signal strength and low toxicity is a critical gap in neuroscience, preventing researchers from gaining a full understanding of how the brain works.”
The team is excited about the prospect that new recombinant H129 viral vectors will lead to transformative tools for neuroscience research, and in the more distant future, clinical applications for human diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and epilepsy. Xu and Sandri-Goldin have assembled a collaborative, interdisciplinary team composed of virologists and systems neuroscientists to develop the new neural analysis tool.

Other principal investigators include Professor Gregory D. Horwitz from the University of Washington and Professor Min-Hua Luo from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Their research proposal, "Genetically engineered anterograde monosynaptic viral tracers for multi-species neural circuit analysis,” was submitted in response to a special RFA as part of the BRAIN Initiative: Development and Validation of Novel Tools to Probe Cell-Specific and Circuit-Specific Processes in the Brain.

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BRAIN Initiative
About the NIH BRAIN Initiative

Long desired by researchers seeking new ways to treat, cure, and even prevent brain disorders, this picture will fill major gaps in our current knowledge and provide unprecedented opportunities for exploring exactly how the brain enables the human body to record, process, utilize, store, and retrieve vast quantities of information, all at the speed of thought.