Rapid, widespread transduction of the murine myocardium using self-complementary Adeno-associated virus

Adeno-associated virus (AAV) has shown great promise as a gene transfer vector. However, the incubation time needed to attain significant levels of gene expression is often too long for some clinical applications. Self-complementary AAV (scAAV) enters the cell as double stranded DNA, eliminating the step of second-strand synthesis, proven to be the rate-limiting step for gene expression of single-stranded AAV (ssAAV). The aim of this study was to compare the efficiency of these two types of AAV vectors in the murine myocardium. Four day old CD-1 mice were injected with either of the two AAV constructs, both expressing GFP and packaged into the AAV1 capsid. The animals were held for 4, 6, 11 or 21 days, after which they were euthanized and their hearts were excised. Serial sections of the myocardial tissue were used for real-time PCR quantification of AAV genome copies and for confocal microscopy. Although we observed similar numbers of AAV genomes at each of the different time points present in both the scAAV and the ssAAV infected hearts, microscopic analysis showed expression of GFP as early as 4 days in animals injected with the scAAV, while little or no expression was observed with the ssAAV constructs until day 11. AAV transduction of murine myocardium is therefore significantly enhanced using scAAV constructs.