AAV2/8 works well to infect neurons in all of the dorsal horn without infecting DRG or brain if you inject directly into the dorsal horn tissue. As you can see from our paper you mentioned Peirs et al Neuron, 2015. In supplemental we show results of several serotypes. See also the paper from Wenqin Luo’s group in Neuron 2016 where they also used AAV8.
AAV9 can easily spread to DRG. You may have gone too deep. I assume you were not using a cre mouse line? hSyn is a good promotor for dorsal horn neurons.
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