Molecular Characterization of Visual Pigments in the Bottlenose Dolphin

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Visual pigments provide the molecular machinery to capture the energy of light for detection by photoreceptors of the eye. Differently structured proteins in the different pigments confer best sensitivity to different wavelengths of light, and so to different colors. We know a great deal about color vision in primates, but whales and dolphins also are reported to use color vision and we know very little about their visual adaptations to a predominantly blue underwater world. This project uses molecular biology techniques to explore the visual pigment proteins, called opsins, that are used in dolphin vision. Determining the genetic sequence for these opsins will provide useful data for comparisons with terrestrial mammals and with deep-sea fishes, to see what ways visual pigments may have evolved adaptively to capture the predominant spectral energies in the marine environment. Results from this work will be important not only to visual science, but to better understanding of cetacean biology, the diversity of marine organisms, and evolutionary biology.