Abstract
Cell type-specific Cre driver lines have revolutionized the analysis of retinal cell types and circuits. We show that the transgenic mouse Rbp4-Cre selectively labels several retinal neuronal types relevant to the encoding of absolute light intensity (irradiance) and visual motion. In the ganglion cell layer (GCL), most marked cells are wide-field spiking polyaxonal amacrine cells (ACs) with sustained irradiance-encoding ON responses that persist during chemical synaptic blockade. Their arbors spread about 1 mm across the retina and are restricted to the inner half of the ON sublamina of the inner plexiform layer (IPL). There, they costratify with dendrites of M2 intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs), to which they are tracer coupled. We propose that synaptically driven and intrinsic photo-currents of M2 cells pass through gap junctions to drive AC light responses. Also marked in this mouse are two types of RGCs. R-cells have a bistratified dendritic arbor, weak directional tuning, and irradiance-encoding ON responses. However, they also receive excitatory OFF input, revealed during ON-channel blockade. Serial blockface electron microscopic (SBEM) reconstruction confirms OFF bipolar input, and reveals that some OFF input derives from a novel type of OFF bipolar cell (BC). R-cells innervate specific layers of the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (dLGN) and superior colliculus (SC). The other marked RGC type (RDS) is bistratified, transient, and ON-OFF direction selective (DS). It apparently innervates the nucleus of the optic tract (NOT). The Rbp4-Cre mouse will be valuable for targeting these cell types for further study and for selectively manipulating them for circuit analysis.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0065-17.2017 |
| Journal | eNeuro |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2017 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship of Canada (S.S.), The Sidney A. Fox and Dorothea Doctors Fox Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences (S.S.), and the NIH Grant R01 EY12793 and an award from the Alcon Research Institute (to D.M.B.). Acknowledgements: We thank Dianne Boghossian who maintained the mouse colony and performed genotyping for experimental mice and John Murphy who constructed various microscope stages and retinal mounts. Correspondence should be addressed to David M. Berson, Department of Neuroscience, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, E-mail: david_berson@ brown.edu. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0065-17.2017 Copyright © 2017 Sabbah et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship of Canada (S.S.), The Sidney A. Fox and Dorothea Doctors Fox Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences (S.S.), and the NIH Grant R01 EY12793 and an award from the Alcon Research Institute (to D.M.B.). Acknowledgements: We thank Dianne Boghossian who maintained the mouse colony and performed genotyping for experimental mice and John Murphy who constructed various microscope stages and retinal mounts.
Funding Information:
1Department of Neuroscience, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, and 2National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Sabbah et al.
Keywords
- Amacrine cells
- Bipolar cells
- Direction-selective ganglion cells
- Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells
- Retina