Invited Session III: Diversity in chromatic processing across the animal kingdom: Color processing in the mouse retina.

Abstract

Across species, specialized retinal circuits allow animals to extract visual information from their environments. How retinal circuits extract relevant visual information is a major area of inquiry. In the mouse retina, cone photoreceptors possess a gradient of opsin expression leading to uneven detection of colors across visual space. However, at the output of the retina, ganglion cells' color preferences deviate from this gradient, suggesting that circuits in the retina may alter the color information before sending it to the brain. We explored how circuits in the retina shape chromatic information, focusing on the retina's interneurons, amacrine cells and bipolar cells. We found that inhibitory amacrine cells rebalance color preferences, leading to diverse color selectivity throughout retinal space. Since amacrine cells vary widely across species, these cells are poised to tune the chromatic information sent to the brain to each species' environmental niche.