About Us

We are excited to produce highly purified preparations of Prof. Viviana Gradinaru lab's NIH BRAIN Initiative Armamentarium AAVs for your experiments. We are experienced working with engineered, recombinant AAVs both in terms of characterizing their distribution in the brain and production at scale. 

We were trained by the CLOVER Center at Caltech, which is under the direction of Dr. Tim Shay and leadership of Prof. Viviana Gradinaru. In addition to support from the BRAIN Initiative, we are also supported by a grant from the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. 

What are systemically injected AAVs and how could they help with your research? In brief, these are adeno-associated viruses, which are non-pathogenic, that contain small amino acid additions and/or substitutions to the capsid (surface) proteins that allow for better penetration of the brain and even cell type specific expression within the brian. Some of the AAVs we are producing have specific targeting for endothelial cells, glial types, or neuronal subtypes. We are generating a collection of capsid and cargo combinations that we expect to be useful to many labs--including green fluorescent protein (both with a broad promoter and with Cre-dependent expression), tdTomato, calcium imaging sensors, DREADDs, and so on. 

Faculty director: Andrew Steele, PhD

adsteele@cpp.edu

Lead technician: Andrew Villa, MS, BS (CPP)

Current ASPIRE students:

Arshia Bose

Idalina Bonham

Maia Tahir

Daniela Gonzalez

Former ASPIRE students:

Anaya Crosby

Victor Bautista Vazquez

Fernando Garcia

Irene Tran

Kelli Griggs

Raul Buenrostro

Jack Flaherty

Kalif Johnson 

Former ASPIRE lead technician: Damien Wolfe (CPP BS '16, MS '18)