Responses and receptive fields of amacrine cells and ganglion cells in the salamander retina

Ai Jun Zhang, Samuel M. Wu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

Retinal amacrine cells (ACs) and ganglion cells (GCs) have been shown to display large morphological diversity, and here we show that four types of ACs and three types of GCs exhibit physiologically-distinguishable properties. They are the sustained ON ACs; sustained OFF ACs; transient ON-OFF ACs; transient ON-OFF ACs with wide receptive fields; sustained ON-center/OFF-surround GCs; sustained OFF-center/ON-surround GCs and transient ON-OFF GCs. By comparing response waveforms, receptive fields and relative rod/cone inputs of ACs and GCs with the corresponding parameters of various types of the presynaptic bipolar cells (BCs), we analyze how different types of BCs mediate synaptic inputs to various ACs and GCs. Although more types of third-order retinal neurons may be identified by more refined classification criteria, our observations suggest that many morphologically-distinct ACs and GCs share very similar physiological responses.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)614-622
Number of pages9
JournalVision Research
Volume50
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 17 2010

Keywords

  • Center-surround antagonistic receptive fields
  • Dendritic fields
  • Electrical coupling
  • Relative rod/cone inputs
  • Response waveforms
  • Spatial information processing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Ophthalmology
  • Sensory Systems

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