Infection rates of 80%–95% of the neuron population were obtained for all three rAAVs ( Figures S3A and S3B). QRT-PCR and immunoblot analysis revealed that rAAV-shVEGFD, but not rAAV-shSCR or rAAV-emptymC, reduced VEGFD mRNA levels and blocked VEGFD protein expression ( Figure 4B selleck chemicals and Figure S3C). Expression of VEGFC was not affected by rAAV-shVEGFD or by the two control rAAVs ( Figure 4B). It has been reported that expression of certain shRNAs can have an effect on neuronal morphology because of the induction of an interferon response ( Alvarez et al., 2006). However, by using an interferon-responsive reporter gene system we found no

evidence for an interferon response induced by rAAV-shVEGFD ( Figure S3D). In addition, we observed no increase in cell death in hippocampal neurons infected with rAAV-shVEGFD ( Figure S3E). Morphological analyses revealed that compared to hippocampal neurons transfected with pAAV-shSCR or pAAV-emptymC, neurons transfected with pAAV-shVEGFD showed a less complex dendritic arbor and a reduction in total dendritic length ( Figures 4C–4E). In contrast, RNAi-mediated knockdown of VEGFD did not change spine density (number of spines/20 μm: 7.1 ± 0.36, pAAV-emptymC; 6.17 ± 0.56, pAAV-shSCR; 6.52 ±

0.51, pAAV-shVEGFD). Similar results were obtained with different shRNA sequences directed against VEGFD ( Figure S3F and Supplemental Experimental Procedures). The effect of pAAV-shVEGFD transfection on the dendritic tree could be

reversed by treatment with rVEGFD. In contrast, rVEGFD did not affect dendrite length or BGB324 nmr complexity of hippocampal neurons transfected with pAAV-shSCR and pAAV-emptymC ( Figures 4C–4E). These results identify a role for VEGFD in the regulation of dendritic architecture and further support the above-mentioned concept (see Figure 3) that dendrite arborization and spine morphogenesis are controlled by distinct nuclear calcium/CaMKIV-regulated processes. The observation that the dendrite structure is altered in shVEGFD-expressing neurons even if the surrounding untransfected cells have a normal VEGFD expression level suggests a possible autocrine mechanism of action of VEGFD. To investigate this further, we transfected hippocampal neurons with pAAV-VEGFD-HA or with a plasmid nearly containing an expression cassette for HA-tagged VEGFD resistant to shVEGFD (pAAV-resiVEGFD-HA) together with pAAV-shVEGFD in order to overexpress VEGFD in the same neurons expressing shVEGFD. Expression of resiVEGFD-HA rescued the reduction of dendrite length and complexity caused by expression of shVEGFD ( Figures 4F–4H), indicating that VEGFD acts in an autocrine manner. This conclusion is further supported by an experiment in which hippocampal neurons were first infected with rAAV-VEGFD and subsequently transfected with pAAV-shVEGFD.