Posts tagged J cells
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Seeking a ‘parts list’ for the retina
New technique classifies retinal neurons into 15 categories, including some previously unknown types.
As we scan a scene, many types of neurons in our retinas interact to analyze different aspects of what we see and form a cohesive image. Each type is specialized to respond to a particular variety of visual input — for example, light or darkness, the edges of an object, or movement in a certain direction.
Neuroscientists believe there are 20 to 30 types of these specialized neurons, known as retinal ganglion cells, but they have yet to come up with a definitive classification system.
A new study from MIT neuroscientists has made some headway on this daunting task. Using a computer algorithm that traces the shapes of neurons and groups them based on structural similarity, the researchers sorted more than 350 mouse retinal neurons into 15 types, including six that were previously unidentified.
This technique, described in the March 24 online edition of Nature Communications, could also be deployed to help identify the huge array of neurons found in the brain’s cortex, says Uygar Sumbul, an MIT postdoc and one of the lead authors of the paper. “This delineates a program that we should be doing for the rest of the retina, and elsewhere in the brain, to robustly and precisely know the cell types,” he says.
The paper’s other lead author is former MIT postdoc Sen Song. Sebastian Seung, a former MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and physics who is now at Princeton University, is the paper’s senior author.
(Source: web.mit.edu)
EyeWire launches today with J Day!
It’s time to mobilize a global community of citizen neuroscientists to trace the 3D structure of J Cells and understand how retinal connectomes relate to visual perception.
A specific type of retinal neurons called J Cells respond to stimuli that move downward on the retina (which is the same as upward in the visual world). Neuroscientists do not currently understand how the neural circuits of the retina cause the J Cell to respond in this way. That’s one of the reasons we built EyeWire. By playing EyeWire, you map the 3D structure of retinal neurons and their connections, and collaborate with neuroscientists at MIT, the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, and Harvard.
Over the past several months, members of Sebastian Seung’s lab at MIT have been hard at work making sure EyeWire allows users to accurately contribute to research. During our beta period, an average of 30 to 50 people played EyeWire each day. Collectively, EyeWirers have mapped over 160,000 individual cubes since the beta went live in spring. We hope to dwarf these numbers in the coming months.
Check out a short video from Sebastian Seung, who shares why we created EyeWire and how you can get involved.