Molecular Characterization of Visual Pigments in the Bottlenose Dolphin

视觉色素提供分子机制来捕获光的能量以供眼睛的光感受器检测。 不同色素中的不同结构的蛋白质对不同波长的光具有最佳的敏感性，因此对不同的颜色具有最佳的敏感性。 我们对灵长类动物的色觉了解很多，但据报道，鲸鱼和海豚也使用色觉，我们对它们对以蓝色为主的水下世界的视觉适应知之甚少。 这个项目使用分子生物学技术来探索视觉色素蛋白，称为视蛋白，用于海豚的视觉。 确定这些视蛋白的基因序列将为与陆地哺乳动物和深海鱼类的比较提供有用的数据，以了解视色素可能以何种方式适应性地进化以捕获海洋环境中的主要光谱能量。 这项工作的结果不仅对视觉科学很重要，而且对更好地了解鲸类生物学、海洋生物多样性和进化生物学也很重要。

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.