Reconstruction of the synaptic and cell type specific brain-wide organization of neuronal networks

Delineating the organization of brain-wide neural networks across scales – from cell populations to individual synapses – has been challenging. Replication competent Rabies virus strains can potentially be applied to reveal hierarchical organization of multi-synaptic brain-wide networks. Here, we present a framework to reconstruct the cell type specific organization of whisker related networks at synaptic level. We inject the retrograde rabies virus into a single intrinsic whisker muscle and quantify the trans-synaptic spread across orders of labeling. Furthermore, reconstruction of rabies labelled morphologies provides cell type specific identification of cells within the network. This approach can potentially be applied to reveal the differences in brain-wide network organization due to pathology