The contribution of inner retinal photoreception to mouse visual function

视觉是我们最有价值的感觉，也是百年来科学研究的永恒主题。尽管如此，我们仍在不断发现有关它的令人兴奋的新事物。其中最令人惊讶的是，视网膜中的视杆细胞和视锥细胞并不是我们唯一的光感受器。事实上，我们现在知道，另一组称为mRGC的细胞能够直接对光做出反应。这些mRGC即使在没有视杆和视锥的情况下也能很好地工作，因此在一些盲人身上提供了残余的光敏作用。然而，到目前为止，mRGCs被认为主要为对光的粗略的“潜意识”反应提供输入，例如设置我们眼睛的瞳孔大小，并确保我们体内的生物钟设置为当地时间。几乎没有迹象表明，它们也可以帮助我们看到。我们最近发现，事实上，来自mRGC的信号出现在大脑负责视觉感知的那些部分。那么mRGC是如何帮助我们看到的呢？回答这个问题就是这个提议的主题。我们将通过向几种转基因小鼠提供能够选择性激活mRGC的视觉刺激来实现这一点。然后，我们将能够确定小鼠是否可以使用这些刺激来导航迷宫，以及它们对负责视觉的大脑部分神经元的电活动有什么影响。我们的工作有能力为我们如何看待世界提供新的理解。由于mRGC在视杆细胞和视锥细胞退行性变的患者中存活，这一信息可能特别适用于盲人和部分失明的人。

Sight is our most valued sense, and has been a perennial subject of scientific investigation over the centauries. Nonetheless, we continue to find out exciting new things about it. Among the most surprising of these has been that the rod and cone cells in the retina are not our only photoreceptors. In fact, we now know that another group of cells, called mRGCs, are capable of responding directly to light. These mRGCs work fairly well even when rods and cones are absent, and thus provide residual photosensitivity in some blind people. Until now, however, mRGCs have been thought to mainly provide input to crude 'sub conscious' responses to light, such as setting the size of the pupil in our eyes and ensuring that our internal biological clocks are set to local time. There has been little indication that they could also help us to see. We have recently shown that, in fact, signals from mRGCs appear throughout those parts of the brain responsible for visual perception. How then do mRGCs help us to see? Answering that question is the subject of this proposal. We will achieve this by providing visual stimuli capable of selectively activating mRGCs to several lines of transgenic mice. We will then be able to determine whether mice can use these stimuli to navigate a maze, and also what impact they have on the electrical activity of neurons in parts of the brain responsible for vision. Our work has the capacity to provide a new understanding of how we perceive the world. Because mRGCs survive in people with rod and cone degeneration, this information may be particularly pertinent for the blind and partially sighted.