Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305.
Department of Neuroscience, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut 06520; email:
Annu Rev Neurosci. 2017 Jul 25;40:499-538. doi: 10.1146/annurev-neuro-071714-033842.
Vision is the sense humans rely on most to navigate the world, make decisions, and perform complex tasks. Understanding how humans see thus represents one of the most fundamental and important goals of neuroscience. The use of the mouse as a model for parsing how vision works at a fundamental level started approximately a decade ago, ushered in by the mouse's convenient size, relatively low cost, and, above all, amenability to genetic perturbations. In the course of that effort, a large cadre of new and powerful tools for in vivo labeling, monitoring, and manipulation of neurons were applied to this species. As a consequence, a significant body of work now exists on the architecture, function, and development of mouse central visual pathways. Excitingly, much of that work includes causal testing of the role of specific cell types and circuits in visual perception and behavior-something rare to find in studies of the visual system of other species. Indeed, one could argue that more information is now available about the mouse visual system than any other sensory system, in any species, including humans. As such, the mouse visual system has become a platform for multilevel analysis of the mammalian central nervous system generally. Here we review the mouse visual system structure, function, and development literature and comment on the similarities and differences between the visual system of this and other model species. We also make it a point to highlight the aspects of mouse visual circuitry that remain opaque and that are in need of additional experimentation to enrich our understanding of how vision works on a broad scale.
视觉是人类在世界上导航、做出决策和执行复杂任务最依赖的感觉。因此，理解人类如何看代表了神经科学最基本和最重要的目标之一。大约十年前，人们开始使用老鼠作为模型来解析视觉在基本水平上的工作原理，这是由老鼠的方便大小、相对较低的成本以及最重要的是易于遗传干扰所推动的。在这一努力过程中，大量新的和强大的工具被应用于这种物种，用于在体内标记、监测和操纵神经元。结果，现在已经有大量关于老鼠中枢视觉通路的结构、功能和发育的工作。令人兴奋的是，其中许多工作包括对特定细胞类型和回路在视觉感知和行为中的作用进行因果测试，这在其他物种的视觉系统研究中很少见。事实上，可以说，现在关于老鼠视觉系统的信息比任何其他物种的任何其他感觉系统都要多，包括人类。因此，老鼠视觉系统已成为一般哺乳动物中枢神经系统多层次分析的平台。在这里，我们回顾了老鼠视觉系统的结构、功能和发育文献，并评论了这种和其他模型物种的视觉系统之间的相似之处和不同之处。我们还特别强调了老鼠视觉回路中仍然不透明的方面，需要进行额外的实验来丰富我们对视觉在广泛范围内工作的理解。
