Infection Dynamics and Cell Type Specific Responses to Vesicular Stomatitis Virus Infection in the Mouse Brain

Abstract

Viruses are excellent cell biologists. They can be harnessed to interrogate biological systems and co-opted as tools for therapeutic or research purposes. For a tool to operate best, it’s crucial to know how it functions in the environment in which it is utilized. The neuroscience field has adopted neurotropic viruses as transsynaptic tracers to label and modify neural circuits. Although these viruses are used as practical tools in the brain, our understanding of their specific cellular interactions and the brain tissue’s response to them are still limited. We aimed to address these knowledge gaps by developing a viral system to track differential states of infection, better defining tropism in a cell type specific manner, and investigating factors that influence viral infection outcomes. Additionally, we profiled the brain’s response to viral infection and monitored how various cell types contribute to this response over time. Our findings better inform viral tool design for neuroscience and broaden our understanding of the early immune response to viral infections in the brain parenchyma.