Transmission of scotopic signals from the rod to rod-bipolar cell in the mammalian retina |
| |
Authors: | Taylor W Rowland Smith Robert G |
| |
Affiliation: | Neurological Sciences Institute, Oregon Health and Sciences University--West Campus, 505 NW 185th Avenue, Beaverton, OR 97006, USA. taylorw@ohsu.edu |
| |
Abstract: | Mammals can see at low scotopic light levels where only 1 rod in several thousand transduces a photon. The single photon signal is transmitted to the brain by the ganglion cell, which collects signals from more than 1000 rods to provide enough amplification. If the system were linear, such convergence would increase the neural noise enough to overwhelm the tiny rod signal. Recent studies provide evidence for a threshold nonlinearity in the rod to rod bipolar synapse, which removes much of the background neural noise. We argue that the height of the threshold should be 0.85 times the amplitude of the single photon signal, consistent with the saturation observed for the single photon signal. At this level, the rate of false positive events due to neural noise would be masked by the higher rate of dark thermal events. The evidence presented suggests that this synapse is optimized to transmit the single photon signal at low scotopic light levels. |
| |
Keywords: | Retina Synaptic transmission Single photon Photoreceptor Visual threshold Scotopic vision |
本文献已被 ScienceDirect PubMed 等数据库收录! |
|