Targeting Toxins to Neural Antigens and Receptors

This chapter describes the use of antineuronal immunotoxins to make selective neural lesions. The immunotoxin approach (immunolesioning) has significantly advanced the art of making neural lesions, combining the selectivity of monoclonal immunotoxins with various behavioral, neuroanatomic, neuropharmacologic, and neurophysiologic techniques to analyze the consequences of destroying highly selected neural populations ( 1 , 2 ) . Assessing the effects of neural lesions is a time-honored and effective way to analyze structure-function relationships in the nervous system. Although only a few antineuronal immunotoxins have been described to date, it is clear that this is an analytically powerful improvement in the lesion-making art with great promise for bridging from molecular to systems neuroscience.