Taking advantage of the restricted expression of metabotropic glutamate receptor subtype 6 (mGluR6) in retinal ON bipolar cells, we generated knockout mice lacking mGluR6 expression. The homozygous mutant mice showed a loss of ON responses but unchanged OFF responses to light. The mutant mice displayed no obvious changes in retinal cell organization nor in the projection of optic fibers to the brain. Furthermore, the mGluR6-deficient mice showed visual behavioral responses to light stimulation as examined by shuttle box avoidance behavior experiments using light exposure as a conditioned stimulus. The results demonstrate that mGluR6 is essential in synaptic transmission to the ON bipolar cell and that the OFF response provides an important means for transmitting visual information.

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We generated transgenic mice, using 9.5 kilobase pairs of the 5Ј upstream sequence from the mouse metabotropic glutamate receptor subtype 6 (mGluR6) gene fused to the ␤-galactosidase (lacZ ) reporter gene, and investigated the promoter function of the cell-specific and developmentally regulated expression of mGluR6. Most of the independent transgenic lines commonly showed the lacZ expression in the defined cell layers of the retina, and four transgenic lines were characterized in detail for cell-specific lacZ expression patterns by X-gal staining and lacZ immunostaining. The lacZ-expressing retinal cells were classified into two cell types. One cell type was identified as rod bipolar cells on the basis of colocalization of protein kinase C (PKC) immunoreactivity and morphological criteria. The other cell type was PKC-immunonegative and resided at the cell layers corresponding precisely to ON-type cone bipolar cells. The latter bipolar cells were found to exist as a large cell population comparable to rod bipolar cells. This observation was confirmed by coimmunostaining of dissociated retinal cells with the lacZ and PKC antibodies. The ontogeny analysis indicated that the lacZ expression completely agrees with a temporal expression pattern of mGluR6 during retinal development. This study demonstrates that the mGluR6 5Ј upstream genomic sequence is capable of directing a cell-specific and developmentally regulated expression of mGluR6 in ON-type bipolar cells and supports the view that mGluR6 is responsible for ON responses in both the rod and cone systems.

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