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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Torpedo maculopathy (TM) is a rare macular lesion involving the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). This paper describes a retrospective case report of TM. In addition, the authors present a comprehensive systematic review of 110 cases found in the literature. PATIENTS AND METHODS: A search for the term “torpedo maculopathy” was conducted on PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science databases and yielded 62 relevant studies. RESULTS: The majority of cases in the literature, including this case, reported an asymptomatic hypopigmented temporal lesion with occasional satellite lesions. Fluorescein angiography generally revealed hypofluorescence, whereas optical coherence tomography demonstrated RPE thinning as well as choroid hyperreflectivity. CONCLUSIONS: This is the largest systematic review of torpedo maculopathy to date. The authors' findings confirm that it is a benign, nonprogressive, predominantly unilateral temporal lesion thought to arise during macular development. [ Ophthalmic Surg Lasers Imaging Retina . 2021;52:78–83.]

Background Recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) is widely used in the neuroscience field to manipulate gene expression in the nervous system. However, a limitation to the use of rAAV vectors is the time and expense needed to produce them. To overcome this limitation, we evaluated whether unpurified rAAV vectors secreted into the media following scalable PEI transfection of HEK293T cells can be used in lieu of purified rAAV. Methods We packaged rAAV2-EGFP vectors in 30 different wild-type and mutant capsids and subsequently collected the media containing secreted rAAV. Genomic titers of each rAAV vector were assessed and the ability of each unpurified virus to transduce primary mixed neuroglial cultures (PNGCs), organotypic brain slice cultures (BSCs) and the mouse brain was evaluated. Results There was ~ 40-fold wide variance in the average genomic titers of the rAAV2-EGFP vector packaged in the 30 different capsids, ranging from a low ~ 4.7 × 1010 vector genomes (vg)/mL for rAAV2/5-EGFP to a high of ~ 2.0 × 1012 vg/mL for a capsid mutant of rAAV2/8-EGFP. In PNGC studies, we observed a wide range of transduction efficiency among the 30 capsids evaluated, with the rAAV2/6-EGFP vector demonstrating the highest overall transduction efficiency. In BSC studies, we observed robust transduction by wild-type capsid vectors rAAV2/6, 2/8 and 2/9, and by capsid mutants of rAAV2/1, 2/6, and 2/8. In the in vivo somatic brain transgenesis (SBT) studies, we found that intra-cerebroventricular injection of media containing unpurified rAAV2-EGFP vectors packaged with select mutant capsids resulted in abundant EGFP positive neurons and astrocytes in the hippocampus and forebrain of non-transgenic mice. We demonstrate that unpurified rAAV can express transgenes at equivalent levels to lysate-purified rAAV both in vitro and in vivo. We also show that unpurified rAAV is sufficient to drive tau pathology in BSC and neuroinflammation in vivo, recapitulating previous studies using purified rAAV. Conclusions Unpurified rAAV vectors secreted into the media can efficiently transduce brain cells in vitro and in vivo, providing a cost-effective way to manipulate gene expression. The use of unpurified virus will greatly reduce costs of exploratory studies and further increase the utility of rAAV vectors for standard laboratory use.