The long-term objective of the proposed research is to understand in detail the cellular mechanisms underlying visual transduction in vertebrate retinal photoreceptors.
The specific aims are: i) to understand more about the regulation of intracellular calcium by the sodium-calcium exchanger in the photoreceptors, and to see if any difference in this regard between rods and cones may explain some of their differences in light sensitivity and response kinetics, ii) to learn more about the light-sensitive conductance in both rods and cones, and iii) to learn more about the functional constituents in the light-activated cyclic GMP reaction cascade (i.e. GTP-binding protein, the phosphodiesterase and the 48K protein), and to make a comparison between rods and cones concerning these constituents. A detailed knowledge of the visual transduction mechanism is important for understanding various disease states which affect photoreceptors, and for devising remedies for them. The methodology will involve mainly electrophysiological recordings, employing both suction-pipet and patch-clamp techniques.
| Yue, Wendy Wing Sze; Frederiksen, Rikard; Ren, Xiaozhi et al. (2017) Spontaneous activation of visual pigments in relation to openness/closedness of chromophore-binding pocket. Elife 6: |
| Liao, Hsi-Wen; Ren, Xiaozhi; Peterson, Beth B et al. (2016) Melanopsin-expressing ganglion cells on macaque and human retinas form two morphologically distinct populations. J Comp Neurol 524:2845-72 |
| Zhang, Tao; Cao, Li-Hui; Kumar, Sandeep et al. (2016) Dimerization of visual pigments in vivo. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 113:9093-8 |
| Zhong, Xiufeng; Gutierrez, Christian; Xue, Tian et al. (2014) Generation of three-dimensional retinal tissue with functional photoreceptors from human iPSCs. Nat Commun 5:4047 |
| Cao, Li-Hui; Luo, Dong-Gen; Yau, King-Wai (2014) Light responses of primate and other mammalian cones. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 111:2752-7 |
| Welsbie, Derek S; Yang, Zhiyong; Ge, Yan et al. (2013) Functional genomic screening identifies dual leucine zipper kinase as a key mediator of retinal ganglion cell death. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110:4045-50 |
| Sun, Lu O; Jiang, Zheng; Rivlin-Etzion, Michal et al. (2013) On and off retinal circuit assembly by divergent molecular mechanisms. Science 342:1241974 |
| Pearson, R A; Barber, A C; Rizzi, M et al. (2012) Restoration of vision after transplantation of photoreceptors. Nature 485:99-103 |
| Matsuoka, Ryota L; Jiang, Zheng; Samuels, Ivy S et al. (2012) Guidance-cue control of horizontal cell morphology, lamination, and synapse formation in the mammalian outer retina. J Neurosci 32:6859-68 |
| Sakai, Kazumi; Imamoto, Yasushi; Su, Chih-Ying et al. (2012) Photochemical nature of parietopsin. Biochemistry 51:1933-41 |
Showing the most recent 10 out of 26 publications
