Daniel Kerschensteiner, MD, PhD

Washington University - New Investigator

Project Title: Synaptic reorganization and vision rescue in the neural retina after photoreceptor loss
 
The retina, the neural tissue at the back of the eye, performs two fundamental functions. First, it translates changes in light into changes in synaptic activity, the language of the nervous system. Second, it processes visual information by extracting salient features from the visual scene and communicates them to the brain. Photoreceptors (rods and cones) at the outer margin of the retina perform the first operation. The neural retina receives the photoreceptor signal and carries out the second task. In many diseases including retinitis pigmentosa and rod-cone dystrophies photoreceptors degenerate, leaving the neural retina without visual input. Such sensory deprivation is known to cause circuit remodeling elsewhere in the nervous system, but, how the neural retina responds to the loss of photoreceptors remains poorly understood. This is particularly striking since retina-based approaches to rescuing vision after photoreceptor degeneration rely on the neural retina to correctly process information and generate a message the brain can understand. We therefore propose to study how connections (synapses) in the neural retina change in mice with photoreceptor degeneration. We will then use this information to test a novel approach to restoring visual function to the photoreceptor-less retina through molecular engineering of the neural retina.