The contribution of inner retinal photoreception to mouse visual function

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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.