An eye pigment of the cockroach

Rhodopsin of the Larval Mosquito

“…Although Bowness and Wolken (1959) reported a similar buffer extraction of a pigment from housefly compound eyes, it is likely that the extract contained an accessory pigment, not a visual pigment (Goldsmith, 1964). Wolken and Sheer (1963) used digitonin to extract a 500 nm pigment from the cockroach (Blatta orientalis). It bleached like a rhodopsin, presumably to retinal, but its half-band width (67 nm) was unusually narrow, and did not fit the Dartnall nomogram.…”

“…Most of our knowledge of the physiology of insect vision has come from behavioral or electrophysiological experiments. Only a few attempts have been made to measure insect visual pigments directly: in extracts of heads of adult honeybees (Goldsmith, 1958 a, b) and cockroaches (Wolken and Sheer, 1963), in extracts of the compound eye of a neuropteran, Ascalaphus macaronius (Gogala et al, 1970), and by microspectrophotometry of the compound eye of the flesh fly Calliphora (Langer, 1966(Langer, , 1967. The visual pigments of ocelli have never before been examined directly.…”