RESUMEN
To understand a neural circuit completely requires simultaneous recording from most of the neurons in that circuit. Here we report recording and spike sorting techniques that enable us to record from all or nearly all of the ganglion cells in a patch of the retina. With a dense multi-electrode array, each ganglion cell produces a unique pattern of activity on many electrodes when it fires an action potential. Signals from all of the electrodes are combined with an iterative spike sorting algorithm to resolve ambiguities arising from overlapping spike waveforms. We verify that we are recording from a large fraction of ganglion cells over the array by labeling the ganglion cells with a retrogradely transported dye and by comparing the number of labeled and recorded cells. Using these methods, we show that about 60 receptive fields of ganglion cells cover each point in visual space in the salamander, consistent with anatomical findings.
Asunto(s)
Potenciales de Acción/fisiología , Electrofisiología/métodos , Neurofisiología/métodos , Células Ganglionares de la Retina/fisiología , Procesamiento de Señales Asistido por Computador/instrumentación , Algoritmos , Ambystoma , Animales , Artefactos , Axones/fisiología , Axones/ultraestructura , Dextranos , Electrofisiología/instrumentación , Microelectrodos/normas , Microscopía Electrónica de Transmisión , Vías Nerviosas/fisiología , Vías Nerviosas/ultraestructura , Neurofisiología/instrumentación , Nervio Óptico/fisiología , Nervio Óptico/ultraestructura , Técnicas de Cultivo de Órganos , Células Ganglionares de la Retina/citología , Rodaminas , Transmisión Sináptica/fisiología , Visión Ocular/fisiología , Campos Visuales/fisiologíaRESUMEN
Primordial germ cells (PGC) are the precursors of germline stem cells. In Drosophila, PGC specification is thought to require transcriptional quiescence and three genes, polar granule component (pgc), nanos (nos), and germ cell less (gcl) function to downregulate Pol II transcription. While it is not understood how nos or gcl represses transcription, pgc does so by inhibiting the transcription elongation factor b (P-TEFb), which is responsible for phosphorylating Ser2 residues in the heptad repeat of the C-terminal domain (CTD) of the largest Pol II subunit. In the studies reported here, we demonstrate that nos are a critical regulatory target of pgc. We show that a substantial fraction of the PGCs in pgc embryos have greatly reduced levels of Nos protein and exhibit phenotypes characteristic of nos PGCs. Lastly, restoring germ cell-specific expression of Nos is sufficient to ameliorate the pgc phenotype.
Asunto(s)
Proteínas de Drosophila/genética , Células Germinativas/metabolismo , Factor B de Elongación Transcripcional Positiva/genética , Proteínas de Unión al ARN/genética , Animales , Drosophila/embriología , Drosophila/genética , Proteínas de Drosophila/metabolismo , Regulación del Desarrollo de la Expresión Génica , Péptidos y Proteínas de Señalización Intercelular , Proteínas Nucleares/genética , Proteínas Nucleares/metabolismo , Fenotipo , Factor B de Elongación Transcripcional Positiva/metabolismo , Proteínas de Unión al ARN/metabolismo , Transcripción GenéticaRESUMEN
The concerted action of saccades and fixational eye movements are crucial for seeing stationary objects in the visual world. We studied how these eye movements contribute to retinal coding of visual information using the archer fish as a model system. We quantified the animal's ability to distinguish among objects of different sizes and measured its eye movements. We recorded from populations of retinal ganglion cells with a multielectrode array, while presenting visual stimuli matched to the behavioral task. We found that the beginning of fixation, namely the time immediately after the saccade, provided the most visual information about object size, with fixational eye movements, which consist of tremor and drift in the archer fish, yielding only a minor contribution. A simple decoder that combined information from Asunto(s)
Aprendizaje Discriminativo
, Movimientos Oculares/fisiología
, Percepción de Movimiento/fisiología
, Perciformes/fisiología
, Retina/fisiología
, Percepción del Tamaño/fisiología
, Animales
, Calibración
, Cinética
, Nervio Óptico/fisiología
, Nervio Óptico/ultraestructura
, Tiempo de Reacción
, Células Ganglionares de la Retina/fisiología
, Células Ganglionares de la Retina/ultraestructura
, Percepción Visual/fisiología