Resources

Materials accompanying our paper on neuro-seeER

New paper · August 28, 2026

A bifunctional optical reporter for tracking estrogen response dynamics in neurons

Cara, Guthman, Mishra, Hall, Yokoyama, Sandoval, Gregg, Aghi, Soma, Correa, Falkner, and van Veen

neuro-seeER distinguishes estrogen-sensitive neurons from neurons actively responding to estrogen. It can be used with standard microscopy and photometry approaches in vitro and in vivo, including longitudinal measurements in behaving animals.

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Fluorescence microscopy image accompanying the neuro-seeER paper

seeER resources

Reporter and construct availability

neuro-seeER plasmids and associated construct information.

Addgene ↗

Analysis code

Microscopy analysis functions used for Cara, Guthman et al., Neuron 2026.

GitHub ↗

Archived software release

A permanent, citable snapshot of the analysis code associated with the paper.

Zenodo ↗

Protocols

AAV delivery, microscopy, snapshot photometry, and recommended validation controls.

Coming with release
Unpublished reagents
  • neuro-seeER v1.1 — The SV40 poly(A) sequence following EGFP was replaced with an hGH poly(A) sequence to reduce bacterial recombination caused by repeated sequences in the original construct. It is expected to function similarly in mammalian cells but has not been as extensively validated as v1.0.
AAV plasmid maintenance and recombination check

AAV plasmids should be maintained in a rec− bacterial strain. Before use, test plasmid integrity with an SmaI restriction digest to check for recombination.

Agarose gel showing three uncut seeER colony plasmids and their corresponding SmaI digests with matching two-band patterns
Intact plasmid: three colonies with matching SmaI restriction patterns.
Gel image to come
Recombined plasmid

Lab software

cedna

Lightweight command-line tools for designing and analyzing DNA sequences, including mutagenesis, synonymous recoding, neutral sequence generation, and repeat screening.

GitHub ↗

Earlier resources

Heterogeneity of the ventromedial hypothalamus

Explore gene expression in our 2020 single-cell dataset.

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2020 webserver ↗

Tamoxifen response explorer

Explore neural and glial responses to tamoxifen.

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2021 webserver ↗