scholarly journals Pan-Retinal Characterisation of Light Responses from Ganglion Cells in the Developing Mouse Retina

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit Hilgen ◽  
Sahar Pirmoradian ◽  
Daniela Pamplona ◽  
Pierre Kornprobst ◽  
Bruno Cessac ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Ganglion Cells ◽  
Mouse Retina ◽  
Multielectrode Array ◽  
Retinal Ganglion ◽  
Developmental Profile ◽  
Light Responses ◽  
Ecological Requirements ◽  
Eye Opening ◽  
Dorsal Retina

AbstractWe have investigated the ontogeny of light-driven responses in mouse retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Using a large-scale, high-density multielectrode array, we recorded from hundreds to thousands of RGCs simultaneously at pan-retinal level, including dorsal and ventral locations. Responses to different contrasts not only revealed a complex developmental profile for ON, OFF and ON-OFF RGC types, but also unveiled differences between dorsal and ventral RGCs. At eye-opening, dorsal RGCs of all types were more responsive to light, perhaps indicating an environmental priority to nest viewing for pre-weaning pups. The developmental profile of ON and OFF RGCs exhibited antagonistic behavior, with the strongest ON responses shortly after eye-opening, followed by an increase in the strength of OFF responses later on. Further, we found that with maturation receptive field (RF) center sizes decrease, responses to light get stronger, and centers become more circular while seeing differences in all of them between RGC types. These findings show that retinal functionality is not spatially homogeneous, likely reflecting ecological requirements that favour the early development of dorsal retina, and reflecting different roles in vision in the mature animal.

scholarly journals Tailoring of the axon initial segment shapes the conversion of synaptic inputs into spiking output in OFF-α T retinal ganglion cells

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (37) ◽  
pp. eabb6642
Author(s):  
Paul Werginz ◽  
Vineeth Raghuram ◽  
Shelley I. Fried
Keyword(s):  
Retinal Ganglion Cells ◽  
Initial Segment ◽  
Ganglion Cells ◽  
Axon Initial Segment ◽  
Retinal Ganglion ◽  
Light Responses ◽  
Synaptic Inputs ◽  
Dorsal Cells ◽  
Axon Initial Segments ◽  
Dorsal Retina

Recently, mouse OFF-α transient (OFF-α T) retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) were shown to display a gradient of light responses as a function of position along the dorsal-ventral axis; response differences were correlated to differences in the level of excitatory presynaptic input. Here, we show that postsynaptic differences between cells also make a strong contribution to response differences. Cells in the dorsal retina had longer axon initial segments (AISs)—the greater number of Nav1.6 channels in longer AISs directly mediates higher rates of spiking and helps avoid depolarization block that terminates spiking in ventral cells with shorter AISs. The pre- and postsynaptic specializations that shape the output of OFF-α T RGCs interact in different ways: In dorsal cells, strong inputs and the long AISs are both necessary to generate their strong, sustained spiking outputs, while in ventral cells, weak inputs or the short AISs are both sufficient to limit the spiking signal.

scholarly journals Subtype-dependent postnatal development of direction- and orientation-selective retinal ganglion cells in mice

2014 ◽  
Vol 112 (9) ◽  
pp. 2092-2101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui Chen ◽  
Xiaorong Liu ◽  
Ning Tian
Keyword(s):  
Postnatal Development ◽  
Retinal Ganglion Cells ◽  
Ganglion Cells ◽  
Light Response ◽  
Orientation Selectivity ◽  
Mouse Retina ◽  
Retinal Ganglion ◽  
Tuning Width ◽  
Eye Opening ◽  
Synaptic Mechanisms

The direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) and orientation-selective ganglion cells (OSGCs) encode the directional and the orientational information of a moving object, respectively. It is unclear how DSGCs and OSGCs mature in the mouse retina during postnatal development. Here we investigated the development of DSGCs and OSGCs after eye-opening. We show that 1) DSGCs and OSGCs are present at postnatal day 12 (P12), just before eye-opening; 2) the fractions of both DSGCs and OSGCs increase from P12 to P30; 3) the development of DSGCs and OSGCs is subtype dependent; and 4) direction and orientation selectivity are two separate features of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in the mouse retina. We classified RGCs into different functional subtypes based on their light response properties. Compared with P12, the direction and orientation selectivity of ON-OFF RGCs but not ON RGCs became stronger at P30. The tuning width of DSGCs for both ON and ON-OFF subtypes decreased with age. For OSGCs, we divided them into non-direction-selective (non-DS) OSGCs and direction-selective OSGCs (DS&OSGCs). For DS&OSGCs, we found that there was no correlation between the direction and orientation selectivity, and that the tuning width of both ON and ON-OFF subtypes remained unchanged with age. For non-DS OSGCs, the tuning width of ON but not ON-OFF subtype decreased with development. These findings provide a foundation to reveal the molecular and synaptic mechanisms underlying the development of the direction and orientation selectivity in the retina.

scholarly journals Receptive Field Mosaics of Retinal Ganglion Cells Are Established Without Visual Experience

2010 ◽  
Vol 103 (4) ◽  
pp. 1856-1864 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastacia Anishchenko ◽  
Martin Greschner ◽  
Justin Elstrott ◽  
Alexander Sher ◽  
Alan M. Litke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Receptive Field ◽  
Retinal Ganglion Cells ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Ganglion Cells ◽  
Visual Space ◽  
Light Response ◽  
Retinal Ganglion ◽  
Adult Rats ◽  
Eye Opening

A characteristic feature of adult retina is mosaic organization: a spatial arrangement of cells of each morphological and functional type that produces uniform sampling of visual space. How the mosaics of visual receptive fields emerge in the retina during development is not fully understood. Here we use a large-scale multielectrode array to determine the mosaic organization of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in rats around the time of eye opening and in the adult. At the time of eye opening, we were able to reliably distinguish two types of ON RGCs and two types of OFF RGCs in rat retina based on their light response and intrinsic firing properties. Although the light responses of individual cells were not yet mature at this age, each of the identified functional RGC types formed a receptive field mosaic, where the spacing of the receptive field centers and the overlap of the receptive field extents were similar to those observed in the retinas of adult rats. These findings suggest that, although the light response properties of RGCs may need vision to reach full maturity, extensive visual experience is not required for individual RGC types to form a regular sensory map of visual space.

scholarly journals Non-parametric physiological classification of retinal ganglion cells in the mouse retina

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Jouty ◽  
Gerrit Hilgen ◽  
Evelyne Sernagor ◽  
Matthias H. Hennig
Keyword(s):  
Retinal Ganglion Cells ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Distance Measure ◽  
Ganglion Cells ◽  
High Density ◽  
Mouse Retina ◽  
Retinal Ganglion ◽  
Electrode Arrays

Retinal ganglion cells, the sole output neurons of the retina, exhibit surprising diversity. A recent study reported over 30 distinct types in the mouse retina, indicating that the processing of visual information is highly parallelised in the brain. The advent of high density multi-electrode arrays now enables recording from many hundreds to thousands of neurons from a single retina. Here we describe a method for the automatic classification of large-scale retinal recordings using a simple stimulus paradigm and a spike train distance measure as a clustering metric. We evaluate our approach using synthetic spike trains, and demonstrate that major known cell types are identified in high-density recording sessions from the mouse retina with around 1000 retinal ganglion cells. A comparison across different retinas reveals substantial variability between preparations, suggesting pooling data across retinas should be approached with caution. As a parameter-free method, our approach is broadly applicable for cellular physiological classification in all sensory modalities.

scholarly journals Intrinsic light responses of retinal ganglion cells projecting to the circadian system

2003 ◽  
Vol 17 (9) ◽  
pp. 1727-1735 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin J. Warren ◽  
Charles N. Allen ◽  
R. Lane Brown ◽  
David W. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Retinal Ganglion Cells ◽  
Ganglion Cells ◽  
Circadian System ◽  
Retinal Ganglion ◽  
Light Responses

PDGF and its receptors in the developing rodent retina and optic nerve

Development ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 118 (2) ◽  
pp. 539-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.S. Mudhar ◽  
R.A. Pollock ◽  
C. Wang ◽  
C.D. Stiles ◽  
W.D. Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Optic Nerve ◽  
Optic Chiasm ◽  
Inner Nuclear Layer ◽  
Mouse Retina ◽  
Beta Subunits ◽  
Retinal Ganglion ◽  
Rna Transcripts ◽  
Eye Opening ◽  
Optic Fibre ◽  
Ganglion Neurons

We have used in situ hybridization to visualize cells in the developing rat retina and optic nerve that express mRNAs encoding the A and B chains of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF-A and PDGF-B), and the alpha and beta subunits of the PDGF receptor (PDGF-alpha R and PDGF-beta R). We have also visualized PDGF-A protein in these tissues by immunohistochemistry. In the retina, PDGF-A mRNA is present in pigment epithelial cells, ganglion neurons and a subset of amacrine neurons. PDGF-A transcripts accumulate in ganglion neurons during target innervation and in amacrine neurons around the time of eye opening, suggesting that PDGF-A expression in these cells may be regulated by target-derived signals or by electrical activity. In the mouse retina, PDGF-A immunoreactivity is present in the cell bodies, dendrites and proximal axons of ganglion neurons, and throughout the inner nuclear layer. PDGF-alpha R mRNA is expressed in the retina by astrocytes in the optic fibre layer and by a subset of cells in the inner nuclear layer that might be Muller glia or bipolar neurons. Taken together, our data suggest short-range paracrine interactions between PDGF-A and PDGF-alpha R, the ligand and its receptor being expressed in neighbouring layers of cells in the retina. In the optic nerve, PDGF-A immunoreactivity is present in astrocytes but apparently not in the retinal ganglion cell axons. PDGF-alpha R+ cells in the optic nerve first appear near the optic chiasm and subsequently spread to the retinal end of the nerve; these PDGF-alpha R+ cells are probably oligodendrocyte precursors (Pringle et al., 1992). RNA transcripts encoding PDGF-B and PDGF-beta R are expressed by cells of the hyaloid and mature vascular systems in the eye and optic nerve.

scholarly journals Loss of Responses to Visual But Not Electrical Stimulation in Ganglion Cells of Rats With Severe Photoreceptor Degeneration

2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (6) ◽  
pp. 3260-3269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Sekirnjak ◽  
Clare Hulse ◽  
Lauren H. Jepson ◽  
Pawel Hottowy ◽  
Alexander Sher ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Electrical Stimulation ◽  
Retinal Ganglion Cells ◽  
Vision Loss ◽  
Ganglion Cells ◽  
Transgenic Rat ◽  
Direct Electrical Stimulation ◽  
Retinal Ganglion ◽  
Photoreceptor Degeneration ◽  
Wild Type ◽  
Light Responses

Retinal implants are intended to help patients with degenerative conditions by electrically stimulating surviving cells to produce artificial vision. However, little is known about how individual retinal ganglion cells respond to direct electrical stimulation in degenerating retina. Here we used a transgenic rat model to characterize ganglion cell responses to light and electrical stimulation during photoreceptor degeneration. Retinas from pigmented P23H-1 rats were compared with wild-type retinas between ages P37 and P752. During degeneration, retinal thickness declined by 50%, largely as a consequence of photoreceptor loss. Spontaneous electrical activity in retinal ganglion cells initially increased two- to threefold, but returned to nearly normal levels around P600. A profound decrease in the number of light-responsive ganglion cells was observed during degeneration, culminating in retinas without detectable light responses by P550. Ganglion cells from transgenic and wild-type animals were targeted for focal electrical stimulation using multielectrode arrays with electrode diameters of ∼10 microns. Ganglion cells were stimulated directly and the success rate of stimulation in both groups was 60–70% at all ages. Surprisingly, thresholds (∼0.05 mC/cm2) and latencies (∼0.25 ms) in P23H rat ganglion cells were comparable to those in wild-type ganglion cells at all ages and showed no change over time. Thus ganglion cells in P23H rats respond normally to direct electrical stimulation despite severe photoreceptor degeneration and complete loss of light responses. These findings suggest that high-resolution epiretinal prosthetic devices may be effective in treating vision loss resulting from photoreceptor degeneration.

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