Baden Tom, Berens Philipp, Franke Katrin, Román Rosón Miroslav, Bethge Matthias, Euler Thomas
Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
Nature. 2016 Jan 21;529(7586):345-50. doi: 10.1038/nature16468. Epub 2016 Jan 6.
In the vertebrate visual system, all output of the retina is carried by retinal ganglion cells. Each type encodes distinct visual features in parallel for transmission to the brain. How many such 'output channels' exist and what each encodes are areas of intense debate. In the mouse, anatomical estimates range from 15 to 20 channels, and only a handful are functionally understood. By combining two-photon calcium imaging to obtain dense retinal recordings and unsupervised clustering of the resulting sample of more than 11,000 cells, here we show that the mouse retina harbours substantially more than 30 functional output channels. These include all known and several new ganglion cell types, as verified by genetic and anatomical criteria. Therefore, information channels from the mouse eye to the mouse brain are considerably more diverse than shown thus far by anatomical studies, suggesting an encoding strategy resembling that used in state-of-the-art artificial vision systems.
在脊椎动物视觉系统中，视网膜的所有输出均由视网膜神经节细胞承载。每种类型的细胞并行编码不同的视觉特征，以便传输至大脑。存在多少这样的“输出通道”以及每个通道编码什么内容，是激烈争论的领域。在小鼠中，解剖学估计的通道数量在15到20个之间，而只有少数通道的功能得到了解。通过结合双光子钙成像以获得密集的视网膜记录，并对由此产生的超过11,000个细胞样本进行无监督聚类，我们在此表明，小鼠视网膜拥有的功能输出通道远超过30个。这些通道包括所有已知的神经节细胞类型以及几种新的类型，这已通过遗传学和解剖学标准得到验证。因此，从小鼠眼睛到小鼠大脑的信息通道比迄今为止解剖学研究所显示的要多样化得多，这表明其编码策略类似于最先进的人工视觉系统所使用的策略。
