Another Blue-ON ganglion cell in the primate retina
Sara S. Patterson, Marcus A. Mazzaferri, Andrea S. Bordt, Jolie L. Chang, Maureen Neitz, Jay Neitz
Abstract
A classic and highly influential model of visual processing proposes that the role of the retina is to compress visual information for optimal transmission to the brain [1Barlow H. Possible principles underlying the transformations of sensory messages.in: Rosenbith W.A. Sensory Communication. MIT Press), Cambridge, MA1961: 217-234Google Scholar]. Drawing on ideas from information theory, an efficient retinal code could be defined as one that reduces redundancy to communicate as much information as possible, given the optic nerve’s limited capacity. From this redundancy reduction hypothesis, a theory of retinal color coding emerged in which the three most common retinal ganglion cell (RGC) types captured much of the variance in natural spectra [2Atick J.J. Li Z. Redlich A.N. Understanding retinal color coding from first principles.Neural Comput. 1992; 4: 559-572Crossref Google Scholar]. Within this compact code, the ‘Blue-ON’ small bistratified RGC was thought to be the only pathway necessary for comparing short (S) wavelength-sensitive cones to long (L) and medium (M) wavelength-sensitive cones [3Dacey D.M. Lee B.B. The “blue-on” opponent pathway in primate retina originates from a distinct bistratified ganglion cell type.Nature. 1994; 367: 731-735Crossref PubMed Scopus (558) Google Scholar,4De Valois R.L. De Valois K.K. A multi-stage color model.Vision Res. 1993; 33: 1053-1065Crossref PubMed Scopus (384) Google Scholar]. Here, we discovered a new wide-field RGC type receiving the same cone-opponent input as the small bistratified RGC, indicating that there is more redundancy in the retinal color code than previously appreciated.