Orientation computation by a novel group of retinal amacrine cells
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program
First Advisor
Demb, Janothan
Abstract
To execute a complex task, an effective strategy employed by intelligent systems is to break down the task and encode task-related features individually. In the brain, the visual system encodes natural scenes by decomposing images into discrete features. One of the most salient and fundamental visual features is orientation. However, how it is computed and encoded in the earliest stage of the visual system, the retina, remains poorly understood. In Chapter 2 of this thesis, we introduce an intersectional genetic strategy that leads to the discovery of a novel group of orientation-selective, non-spiking, wide-field amacrine cells in the mouse retina. These neurons make divergent connections to shape the feature computation in multiple types of retinal neurons, yet how they compute orientation themselves was elusive. In Chapter 3 of the thesis, we identify a computational rule underlying the establishment of dendritic orientation selectivity in the neurons discovered in Chapter 2. Furthermore, we illuminate the unique neuronal implementation of this rule within the retinal circuitry, enriching the current understanding of the diverse strategies utilized across different hierarchies of the visual system to achieve orientation selectivity.
Recommended Citation
Lei, Wanyu, "Orientation computation by a novel group of retinal amacrine cells" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1120.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1120
