The contribution of inner retinal photoreception to mouse visual function

视觉是我们最宝贵的感官，几个世纪以来一直是科学研究的永恒主题。尽管如此，我们仍在继续发现令人兴奋的新事物。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细胞，称为mrgc，能够直接对光作出反应。即使在视杆细胞和视锥细胞缺失的情况下，这些核磁共振成像也能很好地工作，因此在一些盲人身上提供了残留的光敏性。然而，到目前为止，核磁共振成像一直被认为主要是为对光的粗略“潜意识”反应提供输入，比如设置我们眼睛瞳孔的大小，并确保我们的内部生物钟被设置为当地时间。几乎没有迹象表明它们也能帮助我们看到东西。我们最近的研究表明，事实上，来自核磁共振断层扫描的信号出现在大脑中负责视觉感知的部分。那么磁共振成像是如何帮助我们看东西的呢？回答这个问题是本提案的主题。我们将通过提供能够选择性激活mrgc的视觉刺激来实现这一目标。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，以及它们对大脑中负责视觉的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感知世界提供新的理解。由于核磁共振成像在杆状体和锥体变性患者中存活，因此这一信息可能与盲人和视力不佳的人特别相关。

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.