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Exploring the Population Characteristics of Direction-Selective Ganglion Cells Across the Retinal Space
Svatoň, Jan ; Paštěka, Richard (oponent) ; Jösch, Maximilian (vedoucí práce)
In the last century, substantial research has been dedicated to gaining an understanding of how visual information is encoded by neural populations and circuits. The overall picture that emerged from these efforts shows that visual information is first processed by intricate circuitries in the retina and subsequently relayed to higher brain structures. Both stages appear to have developed remarkably sophisticated computations. The functional study of these neuronal transformations has been examined either using electrophysiological or imaging techniques. In the retina, these techniques have limited the analysis of spatial specializations across the retina, either by the number of available electrodes (in electrophysiology) or the size of the field-of-view (FOV) (in imaging experiments). For example, simultaneous recordings of retinal ganglion cells (RGC) have been confined to an area (~ 200 x 200 um2) using state-of-the-art imaging techniques. In my thesis, I have explored a newly developed method that uses a FOV, which is 40-times larger in comparison with conventional optical methods, allowing me to overcome this technical limitation. This thesis uses this novel method to explore population characteristics of direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) across the retinal space of mouse retinas. By recreating already known population patterns, we confirmed that our novel imaging method works. In addition, this thesis investigates the effects of adjuvants for enhanced global RGC infection rates that may potentially facilitate the unbiased recording of RGCs and introduces a novel stimulus for inspecting receptive fields (RFs) of RGCs. This novel stimulus outperforms conventional stimuli used in current studies in both the resolution of the yielded RF and the necessary time of stimulus presentation. It opens the door for following studies to describe for the first time the distribution patterns of RFs across the retinal space and to improve the clustering of cell classes.
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Exploring the Population Characteristics of Direction-Selective Ganglion Cells Across the Retinal Space
Svatoň, Jan ; Paštěka, Richard (oponent) ; Jösch, Maximilian (vedoucí práce)
In the last century, substantial research has been dedicated to gaining an understanding of how visual information is encoded by neural populations and circuits. The overall picture that emerged from these efforts shows that visual information is first processed by intricate circuitries in the retina and subsequently relayed to higher brain structures. Both stages appear to have developed remarkably sophisticated computations. The functional study of these neuronal transformations has been examined either using electrophysiological or imaging techniques. In the retina, these techniques have limited the analysis of spatial specializations across the retina, either by the number of available electrodes (in electrophysiology) or the size of the field-of-view (FOV) (in imaging experiments). For example, simultaneous recordings of retinal ganglion cells (RGC) have been confined to an area (~ 200 x 200 um2) using state-of-the-art imaging techniques. In my thesis, I have explored a newly developed method that uses a FOV, which is 40-times larger in comparison with conventional optical methods, allowing me to overcome this technical limitation. This thesis uses this novel method to explore population characteristics of direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) across the retinal space of mouse retinas. By recreating already known population patterns, we confirmed that our novel imaging method works. In addition, this thesis investigates the effects of adjuvants for enhanced global RGC infection rates that may potentially facilitate the unbiased recording of RGCs and introduces a novel stimulus for inspecting receptive fields (RFs) of RGCs. This novel stimulus outperforms conventional stimuli used in current studies in both the resolution of the yielded RF and the necessary time of stimulus presentation. It opens the door for following studies to describe for the first time the distribution patterns of RFs across the retinal space and to improve the clustering of cell classes.
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