- Cone photoreceptors in retinal degeneration have been thought to be dormant
- However, new research suggests cone photoreceptors in a degenerating retina may continue producing responses to light.
- Researchers recorded downstream signals from the retina that indicate visual processing was not as compromised as might be expected.
In the retina, the cells responsible for the visual experience are rods and cones.
These cells are called photoreceptors and they absorb and convert light into electric signals.
Rods are active in dim light. Cones are active in daylight and help a person see colors.
Alapakkam Sampath, the chair of ophthalmology at the the University of California Los Angeles’ Jules Stein Eye Institute and a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, has spent the past quarter of a century studying how photoreceptors in the retina work.
“The photoreceptor cell is the the only conduit for our visual experience,” Sampath told Medical News Today. “When photoreceptors begin to die, it results in blindness, which is quite debilitating for us as humans given that so much of our brain is dedicated to processing visual images.”
Sampath was the senior author of a study published in the journal Current Biology that suggests that cone photoreceptors in the degenerating retina of mice continue to function and are able to produce responses to light.
Retinitis pigmentosa is a group of inherited diseases that cause the photoreceptors to die, resulting in vision loss and eventual blindness. The condition
Initially, retinitis pigmentosa affects the rods, which causes night vision issues. As the rods die off, the ailment begins to affect the cones, leading to blindness.
“Typically in the literature they’ve always been called dormant cones,” Sampath explained. “The dormancy has embedded in it the notion that they’re not doing anything.”
Sampath and the other researchers set out to…
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