Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yueyang Road, Shanghai 200031, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 19(A) Yuquan Road, Beijing 100049, China.
Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yueyang Road, Shanghai 200031, China.
Curr Biol. 2021 Jun 7;31(11):2263-2273.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.03.025. Epub 2021 Apr 1.
Animals respond to visual threats, such as a looming object, with innate defensive behaviors. Here, we report that a specific type of retinal ganglion cell (RGC), the OFF-transient alpha RGC, is critical for the detection of looming objects. We identified Kcnip2 as its molecular marker. The activity of the Kcnip2-expressing RGCs encodes the size of the looming object. Ablation or suppression of these RGCs abolished or severely impaired the escape and freezing behaviors of mice in response to a looming object, while activation of their somas in the retina, or their axon terminals in the superior colliculus, triggered immediate escape behavior. Our results link the activity of a single type of RGC to visually triggered innate defensive behaviors and underscore that ethologically significant visual information is encoded by a labeled line strategy as early as in the retina.
动物会对视觉威胁（如逼近的物体）做出本能的防御行为。在这里，我们报告说，一种特定类型的视网膜神经节细胞（RGC），即 OFF 瞬态 alpha RGC，对于检测逼近的物体至关重要。我们确定 Kcnip2 是其分子标志物。表达 Kcnip2 的 RGC 的活动编码逼近物体的大小。这些 RGC 的消融或抑制会消除或严重损害小鼠对逼近物体的逃避和冻结行为，而在视网膜中激活它们的体部，或在上丘中激活它们的轴突末梢，会立即触发逃避行为。我们的结果将单一类型的 RGC 的活动与视觉触发的先天防御行为联系起来，并强调表明，在视网膜中，就已经采用标记线策略对具有重要生态学意义的视觉信息进行编码。
