期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2008
卷号：105
期号：36
页码：13638-13643
DOI：10.1073/pnas.0807178105
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：The structural and functional properties of the visual system are disrupted in mutant animals lacking the {beta}2 subunit of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. In particular, eye-specific retinogeniculate projections do not develop normally in these mutants. It is widely thought that the developing retinas of {beta}2-/- mutants do not manifest correlated activity, leading to the notion that retinal waves play an instructional role in the formation of eye-specific retinogeniculate projections. By multielectrode array recordings, we show here that the {beta}2-/- mutants have robust retinal waves during the formation of eye-specific projections. Unlike in WT animals, however, the mutant retinal waves are propagated by gap junctions rather than cholinergic circuitry. These results indicate that lack of retinal waves cannot account for the abnormalities that have been documented in the retinogeniculate pathway of the {beta}2-/- mutants and suggest that other factors must contribute to the deficits in the visual system that have been noted in these animals.
