The mechanism by which the eye generates nerve impulses in response to light, the process known as visual transduction, is incompletely understood although obviously important and scientifically interesting. This project is intended to improve our understanding of the process. The fruit fly, Drosophila, has long been used as research material because of its small number of chromosomes and their unique property of having easily visible structural details during certain phases of the insect's life. There are now many mutant strains available, a number of which have visual defects that probably include defects in their ability to perform the sequence of events that comprisevisual transduction. Such mutants will be exploited in this project in an effort to do a molecular genetic "dissection" of the process. The basic experimental method will be to record electrical events (precursory to and secondary to nerve impulses) from cells of the eyes of mutant flies while exposing the cells to various pharmacological agents and compounds that are believed to be produced at various steps in transduction. In this way it will be possible to define the steps better and clarify the overall process. It will also precisely define the defects in the mutants, thereby rendering them more useful in other studies of genetic aspects of the problem.
