Gene Delivery to the Mouse Brain with Adeno-Associated Virus

The efficient transduction of postmitotic cells by adeno-associated virus (AAV) makes it an excellent vector to deliver marker, functional, or therapeutic genes to the mammalian brain. An attractive feature of AAV is that all the viral-coding sequences are removed when engineering the recombinant genome, thereby limiting the extent of cell toxicity and immune response that are often associated with viral gene transcription (1 ).