AAV with CAG2 promoter driven hChR2(T159C)-ECFP

This AAV expresses hChR2(T159C)-ECFP driven by an ubiquitous CAG2 promoter.

The CAG2 promoter is derived from the commonly used 1.8kb CAG/CBA (also called CAGGS) promoter. To increase the cloning capacity of size-limiting vectors using the CAG promoter, such as AAV or lentiviral vectors, CAG2 was developed by deleting a portion of about 0.6Kb of the chicken beta-actin intron from the original CAG promoter.

hChR2 is a humanized version of ChR2 for mammalian expression. The wild-type, as well as a few mutations, provide the fastest excitation of the channelrhodopsins offered, and are widely used in optogenetics techniques in neuroscience. hChR2(T159C) shows slightly higher photocurrents than the hChR2(H134R), another commonly used optogenetics tool.