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The Journal of Neuroscience, September 15, 1999, 19(18):8049-8056

The Nondiscriminating Zone of Directionally Selective Retinal Ganglion Cells: Comparison with Dendritic Structure and Implications for Mechanism

Shigang He, Zhe Fei Jin, and Richard H. Masland

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02114

We have studied, at high resolution, the sizes and pattern of dendrites of directionally selective retinal ganglion cells in the rabbit. The dendrites had a distinctive pattern of branching. The major dendritic trunks were relatively thick, beginning at ~1 µm and tapering to ~0.5 µm in diameter. Higher order dendrites exiting from them generally stepped abruptly to a diameter of 0.4-0.6 µm, which they maintained throughout their length. Recording confirmed the existence of a zone within the receptive field, usually occupying 20-25% of its area, where direction of movement was only weakly discriminated. The dendritic arbors of cells, injected with Lucifer yellow after recording, revealed no difference in dendritic structure between the discriminating and nondiscriminating zones. The nondiscriminating zone was located on the preferred side of the receptive field (the side from which movement in the preferred direction originates). This is consistent with a mechanism of direction selectivity based on inhibition generated by movement in the null direction but not with feedforward excitation, as occurs in flies and is postulated in some models of mammalian direction selectivity.

Key words: retina; direction selectivity; mechanism; anatomy; physiology; structure

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Copyright © 1999 Society for Neuroscience  0270-6474/99/19188049-08$05.00/0

This article has been cited by other articles:

				W. Dong, W. Sun, Y. Zhang, X. Chen, and S. He Dendritic relationship between starburst amacrine cells and direction-selective ganglion cells in the rabbit retina J. Physiol., April 1, 2004; 556(1): 11 - 17. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				C.-H. Mo and C. Koch Modeling Reverse-Phi Motion-Selective Neurons in Cortex: Double Synaptic-Veto Mechanism Neural Comput., April 1, 2003; 15(4): 735 - 759. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				R. L. Rockhill, F. J. Daly, M. A. MacNeil, S. P. Brown, and R. H. Masland The Diversity of Ganglion Cells in a Mammalian Retina J. Neurosci., May 1, 2002; 22(9): 3831 - 3843. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				W. R. Taylor, S. He, W. R. Levick, and D. I. Vaney Dendritic Computation of Direction Selectivity by Retinal Ganglion Cells Science, September 29, 2000; 289(5488): 2347 - 2350. [Abstract] [Full Text]

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