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Early light refines the brain's circuitry for vision
Date:6/5/2011

ce rewire to distinguish between their eyes.

"For certain functions, the brain wants to keep track of which eye is which," Berson said. Among those functions are the perception of depth and distance.

At a circuit level, the brain keeps signals from the two eyes distinct by segregating their nerve endings into separate regions in the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN), a key waystation on the path to the visual cortex and conscious visual perception. Scientists have long known this sorting-out process depends on waves of activity that spontaneously excite cells in the inner retina. They did not know until now that the waves are influenced by a light-sensitive type of cell called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs).

About a decade ago, a team Berson led at Brown discovered the ipRGCs, which are the first light-sensitive cells to develop in the eye. They reside in the inner retina, the home of retinal cells that send visual information directly to the brain. The outer retina is where the more familiar rods and cones sense light. Early in life, when the brain is segregating nerve endings into distinct regions in the dLGN, the two retinal layers are not connected, so until ipRGCs were discovered there was no reason to believe that light would affect the sorting process.

The new research doesn't say anything definitive about the consequences of light exposure at this stage for eyesight in adults, especially given that some mammals (such as monkeys) experience this developmental stage in utero.

"Whether different animals in nature are exposed to enough light to induce a change in segregation patterns is unclear," Renna said.

But the research shows that light exposure does improve how well the sorting goes, Berson said, and the work advances neuroscientists' understanding of the eye-distinction process, which is widely studied as a model of "activity-driven" neural development.

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Contact: David Orenstein
david_orenstein@brown.edu
401-863-1862
Brown University
Source:Eurekalert

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