Topic: tripartite synapses

Astrocytes communicate bidirectionally with neurons by forming close contacts to synapses called tripartite synapses. Hundreds of thousands of synapses are embedded in a territory of single astrocytes, however, how astrocytes are functionally built into the neuronal circuits remains undetermined. To address this, we adopted the rabies virus (RV) for retrograde tracing of neuron-to-astrocyte connections in the mouse cerebral cortex. To sparsely and specifically transduce astrocytes with RV, a transposon vector expressing TVA, RV glycoprotein, and tdTomato under an astrocyte-specific promoter Gf