Latest Photoreceptor cell Stories
Among the animals that are appealing “cover models” for scientific journals, lancelets don’t spring readily to mind. Slender, limbless, primitive blobs that look pretty much the same end to end, lancelets “are extremely boring. I wouldn’t recommend them for a home aquarium,” says Enrico Nasi, adjunct senior scientist in the MBL’s Cellular Dynamics Program. Yet Nasi and his collaborators managed to land a lancelet on the cover of The Journal of Neuroscience last December. These...
Important element in road towards development of new drugs for neurodegenerative diseases All living cells keep their cellular calcium concentration at a very low level. Since a small increase in calcium can affect many critical cellular functions (an elevated calcium concentration over an extended period can induce cell death), powerful cellular mechanisms ensure that calcium concentration quickly returns to its low level. It is known that impairments of cellular calcium regulation...
Patients who have lost their sight due to some degenerative eye conditions may someday have their vision restored thanks to a new device developed by experts at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The unit, announced by Stanford on Sunday, is a type of retinal prosthesis that uses miniature cells similar to solar panels, which are surgically installed underneath the retina, along with a special pair of camera-equipped goggles and a pocket computer which processes the information...
Members of a University of Pennsylvania research team have shown that they can prevent, or even reverse, a blinding retinal disease, X-linked Retinitis Pigmentosa, or XLRP, in dogs. The disease in humans and dogs is caused by defects in the RPGR gene and results in early, severe and progressive vision loss. It is one of the most common inherited forms of retinal degeneration in man. "Every single abnormal feature that defines the disease in the dogs was corrected following treatment,"...
Biologists and psychologists know that light affects mood, but a new University of Virginia study indicates that light may also play a role in modulating fear and anxiety.Psychologist Brian Wiltgen and biologists Ignacio Provencio and Daniel Warthen of U.Va.'s College of Arts & Sciences worked together to combine studies of fear with research on how light affects physiology and behavior.Using mice as models, they learned that intense light enhances fear or anxiety in mice, which are...
New findings explain rapid signal transmission in eye's initial response to lightA scientist from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute has determined how a particular gene makes night vision possible.The study, which was published in the August 10, 2011 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, focuses on a gene called nyctalopin. Mutations in the gene result in inherited "night blindness," a loss of vision in low-light environments."Until now, our understanding...
Creatures are not born hardwired to see. Instead, they depend on electrical activity in the retina to refine the complex circuits that process visual information. Two new studies from Brown University in different species using different techniques show how nascent animal brains use light to wire up or construct their central vision system.Any parent knows that newborns still have a lot of neurological work to do to attain fully acute vision. In a wide variety of nascent animals, genes...
The human eye long ago solved a problem common to both digital and film cameras: how to get good contrast in an image while also capturing faint detail. Nearly 50 years ago, physiologists described the retina's tricks for improving contrast and sharpening edges, but new experiments by neurobiologists at University of California, Berkeley and the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha show how the eye achieves this without sacrificing shadow detail. These details will be published next...
A team of American and Chinese scientists studying the role of stem cells in repairing damaged retina tissue have found that pigs represent an effective proxy species to research treatments for humans. The study, published in STEM CELLS, demonstrates how stem cells can be isolated and transplanted between pigs, overcoming a key barrier to the research.Treatments to repair the human retina following degenerative diseases remain a challenge for medical science. Unlike species of lower...
In a major breakthrough in the field of regenerative medicine, scientists have for the first time created a part of the eye critical for vision using animal stem cells, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The research could pave the way to new treatments for blindness and human eye diseases, and experts say it may even be possible to one day restore vision with transplanted retinas generated from a patient's own stem cells.The researchers, led by Yoshiki Sasai of...
