Brain Case New Arrival | Novel High-Brightness Red PRV Virus – A Powerful Tool for Peripheral Nervous System Research

Time：2025-07-07 14:51:19

In experimental neuroscience, neurotropic viruses are commonly used to trace and analyze the structure and function of neural circuits. Among them, the pseudorabies virus (PRV) is widely used for retrograde tracing to map the central nervous system’s regulatory networks over peripheral organs. However, due to its low gene expression and high toxicity, PRV typically requires short post-injection sampling windows to avoid animal death and relies on immunohistochemistry to amplify the fluorescent signal, which brings inconvenience to research.

To address the issue of low expression efficiency, Professor Fuqiang Xu’s team at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, optimized the expression levels of reporter genes and developed two new retrograde multisynaptic tracing viruses, PRV531 and PRV724［1］. The study employed several strategies to enhance fluorescent protein expression, including the use of strong promoters, regulatory elements, and multiple copies of fluorescent protein genes inserted into the viral genome. However, due to the limitations of red fluorescent proteins, PRV724—while effective for circuit tracing—still exhibits relatively low red fluorescence expression, often necessitating immunohistochemical amplification. This adds complexity to experiments and extends the experimental timeline.

To overcome these limitations, Brain Case Biotech, in collaboration with Dr. Kunzhang Lin from Prof. Xu’s team at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, has engineered and screened a series of viral tools to develop a new enhanced-brightness PRV—PRV803. By inserting multiple copies of a novel red fluorescent protein, PRV803 significantly boosts red fluorescence expression and delivers improved imaging performance.

The image below shows the peripheral tracing performance of PRV803 in a mouse model. The injection site was the right leg muscle, with a dosage of 3 μL per mouse and an expression period of 5 days.

Image: Peripheral tracing of PRV803 in mice

Reference:
［1］Jia F, Lv P, Miao H, et al. Optimization of the Fluorescent Protein Expression Level Based on Pseudorabies Virus Bartha Strain for Neural Circuit Tracing. Front Neuroanat. 2019;13:63.

Brain Case Biotech offers in-stock PRV803 (red) and PRV531 (green) viral tracers,
each batch validated through in vivo testing.
We welcome researchers to contact us at bd@ebraincase.com
for more product information.

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Brain Case New Arrival | Novel High-Brightness Red PRV Virus – A Powerful Tool for Peripheral Nervous System Research

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