Unusual physiological properties of two ganglion cell types in primate retina

Abstract

The visual functions of the diverse retinal ganglion cell types in the primate retina, and the parallel visual pathways they initiate, remain poorly understood. Here, the unusual physiological and computational properties of the ON and OFF smooth monostratified (SM) ganglion cells are explored. Large-scale multi-electrode recordings from 48 macaque retinas revealed that these cells exhibited strikingly irregular receptive field structure composed of spatially segregated hotspots, quite different from the receptive fields of previously described retinal ganglion cell types. The ON and OFF SM cells are paired cell types, but OFF SM cells exhibited stronger hotspot structure than ON cells. Targeted visual stimulation and computational inference demonstrate strong nonlinear subunit properties of each hotspot that contributed to the signaling properties of SM cells. Analysis of shared inputs to neighboring SM cells indicated that each hotspot could not be explained by an individual presynaptic input. Surprisingly, visual stimulation of different hotspots produced subtly different spatiotemporal spike waveforms in the same SM cell, consistent with a dendritic contribution to hotspot structure. These findings point to a previously unreported nonlinear mechanism in the output of the primate retina that contributes to signaling spatial information. Receptive field properties of simultaneously recorded retinal ganglion cell typesTo explore the properties of poorly understood RGC types, large-scale multi-electrode recordings were used to simultaneously record the light responses of hundreds of RGCs

Projection of Orthogonal Tiling from the Retina to the Visual Cortex

“…We repeated this analysis for 5 sets of RGC mosaic data of different eccentricities, obtained from independent experiments, in multiple species (N = 2 for cat [Wa ¨ssle et al, 1981;Zhan and Troy, 2000]; N = 4 for monkey [Gauthier et al, 2009a[Gauthier et al, , 2009bRhoades et al, 2019;Vidne et al, 2012]) and confirmed the orthogonal intersection between the ON-OFF angle and distance in all sets of tested data (Figure 2D). Each mosaic sample and the average distribution of all datasets showed a peak at 90 , significantly higher than that of the control sets with the shuffled distribution of the ON-OFF angle and distance (Figure 2D 5.12), implying that the orthogonal bias observed in V1 may be projected from that in the RGC mosaics.…”

“…The retinal ganglion cell mosaics in two cats (2 cat, unknown sex, unknown age) are from Wa ¨ssle et al (1981) and Zhan and Troy (2000). The retinal ganglion cell mosaics in monkeys (4 Monkeys, unknown sex, unknown age) are from Gauthier et al (2009aGauthier et al ( , 2009b, Rhoades et al (2019), andVidne et al (2012).…”

Spike-triggered Clustering for Retinal Ganglion Cell Classification

“…These mosaics are consistent with previous studies where ON and OFF RGCs tile the retina [31,32]. However, some ON and STA analysis shows that this RGC appeared to be an ON RGC with a weak light modulation and RF size was about one pixel.…”