Jun 01, 2022
Volume 45Issue 6p415-498, e1-e2
Retinal ganglion cells, the output neurons of the vertebrate retina, encode the visual
signals that fall onto their receptive fields in trains of action potentials. In this
issue of Trends in Neurosciences, Sören J. Zapp, Steffen Nitsche, and Tim Gollisch discuss how the substructure of
a cell’s receptive field—its nonlinear subunits and local temporal dynamics—shapes
the cell’s function and how this substructure can be analyzed with newly emerging
experimental and computational tools. The cover features a stained ganglion cell together
with a recorded spike train and a reconstructed layout of receptive field subunits,
whose shading represents the activation by the natural image depicted underneath.
Cover image by Sören J. Zapp and Tim Gollisch; reconstructed cell by Helene M. Schreyer
and Mohammad H. Khani; subunit layout from Liu et al. (2017), Nat. Commun. 8, 149....Show more
Retinal ganglion cells, the output neurons of the vertebrate retina, encode the visual
signals that fall onto their receptive fields in trains of action potentials. In this
issue of Trends in Neurosciences, Sören J. Zapp, Steffen Nitsche, and Tim Gollisch discuss how the substructure of
a cell’s receptive field—its nonlinear subunits and local temporal dynamics—shapes
the cell’s function and how this substructure can be analyzed with newly emerging
experimental and computational tools. The cover features a stained ganglion cell together
with a recorded spike train and a reconstructed layout of receptive field subunits,
whose shading represents the activation by the natural image depicted underneath.
Cover image by Sören J. Zapp and Tim Gollisch; reconstructed cell by Helene M. Schreyer
and Mohammad H. Khani; subunit layout from Liu et al. (2017), Nat. Commun. 8, 149.
