Having been recognized as a reliable partner in drug discovery, Creative Biolabs offers a comprehensive range of development services for psychiatric disorders. Attracted by the neurotropic characteristic of the rabies virus, our professional scientists provide tailored psychiatric disorder modeling services using recombinant rabies virus vectors.
Introduction to Rabies Virus-Based Vectors
Rabies virus, also formally known as Rabies lyssavirus, is the prototype virus belonging to the genus Lyssavirus in the family Rhabdoviridae. Rabies virus is a cylindrical neurotropic virus that causes rabies in mammals, as well as some birds, reptiles, and insects. Once the rabies virus is transmitted to humans from rabid animals, it replicates and travels quickly to the central nervous system (CNS) along the axons of the peripheral nerves, then infect the brain neurons. In structure, the rabies virus is a bullet-shaped enveloped virus with a single-stranded and negative-sense RNA genome. The RNA genome of the rabies virus encodes five genes, nucleoprotein (N), phosphoprotein (P), matrix protein (M), glycoprotein (G), and the viral RNA polymerase (L), among which P protein is critical for the replication of rabies virus and involves in neuro-invasion and peripheral nerve infection.
The neurotropism property of the rabies virus pulls it to be a useful and invaluable tool in neuroscience research. Currently, recombinant rabies virus and rabies virus-based vector has been increasingly used in the study of neurological physiological functions, pathological mechanisms, neuronal tracing, and disease modeling.
Rabies Virus-Based Vectors for Psychiatric Disorders Modeling
The neurotropic property makes the rabies virus a useful tool for animal modeling of psychiatric disorder, a common neurological disease characterized by mental illness such as emotion, cognition, thinking, and behavior abnormalities. Compared with the homologous recombination method and inducible Cre technologies, psychiatric disorder modeling by recombinant rabies virus-based vectors exhibits several advantages:
-
It is more likely limited to certain cell types in a specific brain area since that rabies virus transported in a strictly trans-synaptical way and rarely spread to non-neuronal cells;
-
Recombinant rabies virus has an extremely low even no cytopathogenicity in infected neurons;
-
Rabies virus is an RNA virus that can express the target proteins in neural cells without causing mutations in the host, which is more suitable for insertion or introduction of the target protein or marker expression in local neural cells.
Therefore, recombinant rabies virus-based vectors are more applicable to animal behavior modeling for psychiatric disorders by introducing identified markers. For efficient transgenic animal modeling for psychiatric disorders, it is preferred to model by combining the rabies virus vector with other genetic manipulation technologies, by which the spatial resolution can be reduced to the level of an individual neuron.
Chose Creative Biolabs for Your Psychiatric Disorder Modeling Project
Founded in 2005, Creative Biolabs has been on the road to drug discovery and related research for more than a decade. We have accumulated abundant experience in the development of animal modeling for molecular mechanism research and novel drug discovery. We integrate professional scientists and advanced technology platform to provide high-quality and custom psychiatric disorder modeling solutions and services.
If you are interested in psychiatric disorder modeling, please do not hesitate to contact us for more details.
For Research Use Only.
