Mesoscale Hub

The hub provides high titer anterograde and retrograde adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) of many serotypes. It also thrives on new technical developments such as the optimization of AAV expression cassettes, vector-assisted spectral tracing, and the establishment of a screen to target specific cell types.

The Hub staff receives the requests and gives advice in generating adequate plasmids (cloning/preparation of the endotoxin-free Maxi-preps) and provides services in generating the viruses. The mesoscale viral hub also provides MLV-based retroviral vectors or lentiviral vectors pseudo-typed to target different CNS cells and support the generation of Rabies tracing for retrograde monosynaptic tracing depending on requests.

Tissue histology has been a gold standard in biomedical research. However, sectioning the tissues results in analysis of restricted brain regions and fragmentation of long neuronal processes, thereby limiting the information on connectivity and reactivity. This hub therefore provides a unique combination of world-wide leading expertise in tracing and clearing technology. It combines novel clearing techniques (developed by hub members) allowing mapping neuronal, vascular and glial networks in whole rodent brains and spinal cords with novel monosynaptic tracing techniques (developed by hub members) allowing to monitor connectivity changes over time during disease progression. This scalable approach will strongly facilitate and standardize the study of neuronal circuits and their connectivity within the SyNergy cluster by allowing unbiased assessment within intact organs and even entire organisms. In addition, large human tissues (~1000 times thicker than standard histology) can also be labelled and cleared- making DISCO clearing a valuable tool also for translational SyNergy projects.