Figure 4.

Novel AAV variants transduce SCs in human nerve segments

(A) Immunofluorescence of longitudinal sections of human sural nerve segments at 14 days after injection. Nerve segments (0.5cm) were injected with AAV-DJ, Pep2hSC1, or Pep2hSC2 vectors encoding a CMV-EGFP transgene (1 × 10¹⁰ vg dose per segment). Insets show magnified area of transduced cells with elongated morphology characteristic of SCs. DAPI (blue), AAV-encoded EGFP (green). Scale bar, 500 μm. (B) Number of EGFP⁺ cells overlapping with DAPI marker in nerve segment 14 days after injection from three donors (mean ± SEM; n = 3). p values were determined by unpaired t-test (∗p ≤ 0.05). (C) Confocal microscopy images of longitudinal sections immunostained for EGFP (green) with either S100 (purple) for SCs, PRX (yellow) for nmSCs, or P75 (red) for non-nmSCs. Blue outlined insets show magnified area of colocalization. Scale bar, 50 μm. (D) Pearson’s correlation coefficient for colocalization of EGFP and PRX or P75 (mean ± SEM; n = 3). Donor 15 is a 42-year-old male, donor 16 is a 44-year-old male, Caucasian, and donor 17 is a 73-year-old male, Asian.